Despite being a terrible PC port, having been originally designed for the iOS, it remains an insightful and very well-done interactive article of sorts; and I’m hoping Valve will bring Geoff back in for a possible “The Final Hours of Half-Life 3” (more recently, he actually did “The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3“). But wait a minute – what’s this?

Geoff Keighley’s “The Final Hours of Portal 2” is an interactive digital story that chronicles the development of Portal 2, from its inception in late 2007 to its release in early 2011. It’s a follow-up to Geoff’s previous “The Final Hours” articles, which he created as part of GameSpot’s “Behind the Games” series. The first one he ever wrote was “The Final Hours of Half-Life“, and if I’m not mistaken, the last one was “The Final Hours of Half-Life 2“.

It would appear that, fairly recently, some malicious code was injected in Final Hours of Portal 2’s database. You see, in order to download all the assets and files that it requires, the application connects to the official TFHoP2 website. However, since Final Hours was not created by Valve, these are not Valve’s servers, and as such, they are completely out of their control. So, for all intents and purposes, TFHoP2 is a third-party application, with little to no association with Valve whatsoever.

At least three of its file links actually send you straight to a malicious webserver that immediately starts downloading malware to your PC. You can find out more at the Steam Forum thread on the subject, posted by PotcFdk, who appears to have first discovered the issue earlier this month (although my anti-virus history shows it detected three trojan scripts within Final Hours, at the beginning of March). So, if you launched it not too long ago, I’d suggest you run a thorough computer scan using your anti-virus.

While at first, Valve stated (through Steam Support) that any instances of malware reports were simply false positives originating from users’ anti-virus software, they have since realized that this is a bit more dangerous than that. So, in response, Valve have completely pulled TFHoP2 from the Steam Store, and the application itself has been made unavailable, albeit temporarily, while they investigate the issue. Apparently, the site owner has already been notified, so hopefully Valve will keep us posted on any new developments. Here’s hoping the application will be clean, and back online in due time.