Early last year, we got to take a look at some… well, some really fancy-looking concept art laid out on the walls inside Valve’s headquarters. There was one thing we all immediately noticed, apart from just how fancy-looking it was – it looked nothing like any existing Valve intellectual property: it had weird spaceships, weird space aliens, and good stuff like that. No one knew what it was all about, and supposedly, Valve didn’t take kindly to this concept art finding its way online at that time. Then a couple of months later, Portal 2 came out, and we were too busy playing that to death to care about whatever Valve’s got cooking in that secret bunker they open by turning the big valve.

Then Dota 2’s beta client got leaked. And among the client’s coding, and among the interesting mentions to “ep3” and “cstrike2” were a number of references to something called “SOB”, including code references for “nebula”; “npc_ship”; “ship_guns”; “client_ship”; “flightplan”; “server_ship”, and quite a bit more, which you can find on this mirror of the code references, provided by Cyborgmatt. Naturally, most of us assumed that this SOB game might just be what that concept art is for.

Now, we have a solid connection between the SOB code and the concept art, and there’s more. Read on!