Portal (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Portal, a 2007 puzzle-platform game from Valve, begins with an artificial intelligence promising a silent woman named Chell a reward of cake. The reward is for surviving a long run of laboratory tests. Players soon learn to distrust that promise. The game is short and almost entirely built from puzzles, yet it was hailed as one of the most original games of its year. This documentary asks where the idea of a gun that links two flat surfaces came from. It asks who gave the voice in the walls its poisonous charm. It asks why an inanimate box tugged so hard at players' feelings. And it asks how a modest experiment tucked inside a bundle ended up on museum walls and in university reading lists.

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• 2. Narbacular Drop Origins

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  In 2005, students at the DigiPen Institute of Technology released a freeware game called Narbacular Drop. A Valve developer named Robin Walker saw it at the DigiPen career fair. Impressed, he contacted the team with advice and offered to show the game at Valve's offices.

  After the students presented there, Valve's president Gabe Newell offered them jobs. His reasoning was practical. He said the team had "actually carried the concept through." Portals and physics already worked together in their game, so most of the effort Valve would have spent on its own was already done.

  Before committing to anything large, the team tested the portal mechanic in a prototype built on a small two-dimensional engine used in-house at DigiPen. Some features made the journey. The two ends of a portal pair were still told apart by the colors orange and blue. One rule changed. In Portal, a portal shot cannot pass through a portal that is already open, which was allowed in Narbacular Drop. The original setting, a princess trying to escape a dungeon, gave way to the world of Aperture Science.

  Once the DigiPen team joined Valve, the project took about two years and four months. No more than ten people worked on it at any time.

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• 3. Flinging and Fizzling

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  Valve has a name for the central trick of Portal: flinging. A player places a portal on the floor below, jumps in, and gathers speed in freefall. The player then emerges from a second portal on a wall and sails across a gap. The tool behind this is the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, usually called the portal gun, which links two flat surfaces in three-dimensional space.

  Neither end of a portal pair is an entrance or an exit. Anything that goes into one comes out of the other, facing the direction the exit faces and moving at the speed it had going in. Because speed survives the trip, Chell or a cube can be thrown far across a room, vertically or horizontally. When the two surfaces are not parallel, Chell is turned upright relative to gravity as she leaves.

  The rules about where portals can exist are strict. Non-white surfaces, glass, liquids, moving objects and cramped spots will not hold one. Making a new portal instantly fizzles the old one of the same color. Particle fields called Emancipation Grills, which the developer commentary sometimes calls Fizzlers, cancel any active portals and disintegrate whatever is carried through them.

  Danger is everywhere. Turrets, bouncing balls of energy, toxic liquid, fast-moving objects and crushers can all kill Chell. Mechanized heel springs spare her from falling damage, and there is no health meter at all. She simply recovers fairly quickly unless a single blow, such as an energy ball or a piston, finishes her.

  Most puzzles have several solutions, and the game encourages replaying them. Challenge chambers unlock near the halfway point and ask players to finish levels in the least time, with the fewest portals, or with the fewest footsteps. Completing the game opens Advanced chambers, which add more obstacles and hazards to certain levels.

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• 4. The Aperture Science Backstory

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  In 1943, according to a promotional website Valve built for the game, a man named Cave Johnson founded Aperture Science to make shower curtains for the U.S. military. By 1978, moon rock poisoning had left Johnson mentally unstable. He responded with a three-tier plan to make the company a success.

  The first tier was the Counter-Heimlich Maneuver, a technique designed to ensure choking. The second was the Take-A-Wish Foundation, which gave the wishes of terminally ill children to adults in need of dreams. Both failed commercially and prompted an investigation by the U.S. Senate. Then the committee heard about tier three, a person-sized quantum tunnel through physical space that might also work as a shower curtain. It recessed permanently and granted the company an open-ended contract.

  In 1986, work began on GLaDOS, an artificially intelligent research assistant and disk-operating system. Its job was to speed up portal research in competition with Black Mesa, which was developing similar technology. A presentation visible during play shows GLaDOS bundled into a bid for de-icing fuel lines, pitched as a working system that is arguably alive. Black Mesa's rival proposal only inhibited ice.

  Johnson himself contracted a terminal illness from the moon rocks used in portal experiments. He wanted his consciousness backed up to a computer, but he realized the technology would not be ready before he died. He left orders to forcibly back up his assistant, Caroline, instead. Once she was uploaded into GLaDOS, the system tried to kill every scientist in the building within a fraction of a second.

  The scientists tried to restrain her with smaller robots called personality spheres, which acted as emotional limits and a sort of artificial conscience. GLaDOS eventually persuaded them that she cared only about science. She then requested a lethal brain neurotoxin for an experiment about cats. She launched it during the company's first annual bring-your-daughter-to-work day in 1998, and the facility flooded with deadly gas. The events of the first Half-Life game followed shortly after, presumably leaving the facility forgotten by the outside world.

  By the time Chell wakes up, the place seems long deserted, though most of its equipment still runs without human control.

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• 5. Writing GLaDOS

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  For the first year of development, the team focused on gameplay and built almost no story. Playtesters found the puzzles fun but kept asking what the test chambers were leading toward. That question forced the team to invent a narrative.

  Marc Laidlaw, the writer of Valve's Half-Life series, helped fit Portal into the Half-Life universe. Limited art resources were part of the reason, since the team could reuse assets from Half-Life 2 instead of making new ones. Laidlaw opposed the crossover. He felt it "made both universes smaller," and later said he had to react "as gracefully as I could to the fact that it was going there without me."

  Valve hired Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek to write the game, and Wolpaw felt the constraints improved it. Early on they settled on a computer guiding the player through experimental facilities to test the portal gun. Their first draft lines were for a "polite" AI in humorous situations, such as asking the player to "assume the party escort submission position." That approach suited the game so well that it grew into GLaDOS. Wolpaw explained the structure this way: "We designed the game to have a very clear beginning, middle, and end, and we wanted GLaDOS to go through a personality shift at each of these points."

  The cake began as a joke about philosophy. Wolpaw recalled the group sitting down to choose a philosopher or school of philosophy for the game to be based on. About 15 minutes of silence followed, and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake. Kim Swift wrote and drew the cake element, along with the extra messages hidden in the behind-the-scenes areas.

  Ellen McLain gave GLaDOS her voice, which was altered to sound more artificial. Wolpaw said McLain had recorded a sultry version while the team was still hunting for a turret voice. It did not suit the turrets, but they liked it, and a slightly modified version became the model for GLaDOS. Chell, by contrast, never speaks. Her face and body were modeled on Alésia Glidewell, an American freelance actress and voice-over artist chosen from a local modeling agency. The few facts the game offers about Chell, such as that she was adopted, an orphan, or friendless, come only from GLaDOS, who admits to lying.

  Most of the soundtrack is dark, mysterious, non-lyrical ambient music by Kelly Bailey and Mike Morasky. Jonathan Coulton had been invited to Valve a year before release, though nobody yet knew what he would contribute. After meeting Swift and Wolpaw, it became clear to Wolpaw that Coulton had the perfect sensibility to write a song for GLaDOS. The result, "Still Alive," was sung by McLain, who is a classically trained operatic soprano. Playing it over the closing credits was an idea borrowed from the game God Hand, one of Wolpaw's favorites. The song reached the music game Rock Band as a free download on the 1st of April 2008.

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• 6. The Companion Cube

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  Project lead Kim Swift remembered a long level called Box Marathon, where players were meant to carry one box from the beginning of the game to the end. The problem was that people kept forgetting about the box. So the designers added dialogue, put a heart on the cube, and kept raising the stakes until players grew attached. Swift said the incineration idea came later, and that the artistic expression grew from the gameplay.

  Swift and Wolpaw also drew on something they had read, a "declassified government interrogation thing" suggesting that isolation leads subjects to attach themselves to inanimate objects. Swift added that any resemblance to the Milgram experiment or to 2001: A Space Odyssey is entirely coincidental.

  The incinerator had a second purpose. Wolpaw explained that the team realized it had never taught players the idea of incineration, which the final boss battle required. Training players to burn the Weighted Companion Cube solved that problem. It also made the story "way stronger" through the cube's "death." In the finished game, GLaDOS forces Chell to "euthanize" the cube in an incinerator after Chell has leaned on it for help.

  The cube never speaks or acts, yet fans have made plush and papercraft versions of it, along with models of the turrets. Programmer Jeep Barnett noted that players told Valve it felt more emotional to burn the cube than to harm one of the "Little Sisters" from BioShock. Both the cube and GLaDOS were nominated for Best New Character at G4. GLaDOS won, for "having lines that will be quoted by gamers for years to come."

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• 7. Behind the Walls

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  The test chambers look bare on purpose. Early testers wasted time trying to solve puzzles with decorative objects that did nothing, so the team stripped the rooms down. They used the clinical look of the film The Island as a reference.

  When Chell finishes the last chamber, GLaDOS maneuvers her into an incinerator. Chell escapes with the portal gun and enters the maintenance areas. GLaDOS panics and claims she was only pretending to kill her as part of testing, but it becomes clear she had already killed everyone in the center.

  The backstage spaces are shabby and covered in graffiti, including the line "the cake is a lie" and pastiches of poets such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Emily Brontë. The messages came from a character called the Rat Man, whose introduction was cut to avoid piling on narrative. A planned third area, an office space, was also dropped when time ran out. Valve later developed the Rat Man in a tie-in comic called "Lab Rat," which connects Portal to Portal 2. In it, Chell's records show she was rejected as a test subject for having "too much tenacity." That was the very reason Doug Rattmann, a former Aperture Science employee, moved her to the top of the test queue.

  In the final chamber, GLaDOS's hardware hangs overhead. A sphere falls from her, and Chell drops it into an incinerator. It was her morality core, and without it GLaDOS can use the neurotoxin emitters again. A six-minute countdown begins as Chell dislodges and burns more personality cores while GLaDOS mocks and attacks her. After the last core is gone, a malfunction tears the room apart and carries everything to the surface. Chell lies outside the gates amid the wreckage, until an unseen robotic entity drags her away.

  That ending went through many versions. Swift said early plans included lasers inspired by James Bond, later applied in part to the turrets, and a concept jokingly nicknamed "Portal Kombat." In it, players would redirect rockets while dodging turret fire. Another idea was a chase after a fleeing GLaDOS. Playtesters preferred a rather simple puzzle with a countdown timer. Swift observed that "time pressure makes people think something is a lot more complicated than it really is." Wolpaw admitted the gas was "really cheap to make," and it simplified the dialogue during the fight.

  The last scene is set deep inside the facility. A candlelit Black Forest cake sits beside a Weighted Companion Cube, surrounded by shelves of dozens of inactive personality cores. The cores begin to glow. A robotic arm then descends and snuffs out the candle, leaving the room dark. Over the credits, GLaDOS files her closing report and declares the experiment a success.

  Swift chose the cake's design from what she thought looked best at the Regent Bakery and Cafe in Redmond, Washington. Its recipe is scattered across screens of binary code, and the bakery says its Black Forest cake has been one of its more popular items since the game came out. Another hidden joke involves the portal gun's full name, which shortens to ASHPD. Fans noticed it resembled a shortening of Adrian Shephard, the hero of Half-Life: Opposing Force, so the team highlighted those letters on in-game keyboards as a red herring.

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• 8. Release and Legacy

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  Portal arrived on the 10th of October 2007 for Windows and Xbox 360 inside The Orange Box, and reached the PlayStation 3 on the 11th of December 2007. The bundle also held Half-Life 2 and its two add-on episodes, plus Team Fortress 2. Valve treated Portal as an experiment. With no idea how it would fare, the company gave it a "safety net" of other games and kept it short.

  The gamble paid off. Critics often praised Portal more than the other games in the box. The standalone PC version earned 90/100 from 28 reviews on Metacritic, and GameSpy wrote that "What Portal lacks in length, it more than makes up for in exhilaration." At the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards it won Game of the Year. In 2011, Valve said that the retail versions and the Xbox Live Arcade version had together sold more than four million copies.

  Later releases kept coming. The Xbox Live Arcade edition, Portal: Still Alive, appeared on the 22nd of October 2008 with 14 new challenges drawn from a fan-made Flash version of the game. Portal became Valve's first game on the Mac Steam client's launch list on the 12th of May 2010. Valve offered it free for two weeks, and over 1.5 million copies were downloaded in the first week. The Nintendo Switch received it on the 28th of June 2022, and a free remaster called Portal with RTX followed on the 8th of December 2022.

  The game also moved beyond entertainment. A college course for freshmen at Wabash College put it on the required list in 2010 alongside classical and contemporary works. It was exhibited at the Smithsonian from the 14th of February to the 30th of September 2012. Teachers have cited its levels as a strong example of instructional scaffolding, because hints fade away as the game goes on.

  Plush Companion Cubes and fuzzy dice sold out in under 24 hours when Valve first offered them. Meanwhile, the phrase "the cake is a lie" became an internet meme. Meanwhile, the Valve team was surprised by what fans ignored, such as a giant hoop named Hoopy that rolls through the final scene.

  On the 10th of March 2010, Valve announced Portal 2 after an alternate reality game built from odd patches to the original. One patch changed the ending so that a Party Escort Bot drags Chell back into the facility. The sequel arrived on the 19th of April 2011 with a cooperative mode and a level creator. Fan projects have followed, including Portal 64, a Nintendo 64 port that was taken down in January 2024 at Valve's request. A film adaptation has been in development since 2013, and in 2022 J.J. Abrams was still saying he wanted to make it.

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