Portal

Portal the game

In Portal, the player controls the character named Chell from a first person perspective as she is challenged to navigate through a series of rooms using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device ("portal gun" or "ASHPD"). The portal gun can create two distinct portal ends, orange and blue. Neither is specifically an entrance or exit; all objects that travel through the one portal will exit through the other. However, a portal shot cannot pass through an open portal, instead recognising the wall the portal is on to still exist, reopening the portal. If subsequent portal ends are created, the previously created portal of the same color is closed. Not all surfaces are able to accommodate a portal. Chell is sometimes provided with cubes which she can pick up and use to climb on or to hold down large buttons that open doors or activate mechanisms. Special barriers exist at the end of test chambers (and within some) which, when passed through, close any open portals and "emancipate" (disintegrate) any cubes carried through; portals cannot be fired through them.^[8]

A representation of how speed (but not directionality) is conserved through portals. By jumping into the lower portal, the character is launched out of the upper portal and onto the platform on the right.

The portals create a visual and physical connection between two different locations in three-dimensional space. If portal ends are not on parallel planes, an object or character passing through is reoriented to be upright with respect to gravity after leaving a portal end. An important aspect of the game's physics is "momentum redirection."^[9] Objects retain their speed as they pass through the portals but their direction will be altered depending on the orientation of the exit portal.^[10] This allows the player to launch objects or Chell herself over great distances, both vertically and horizontally, a maneuver referred to as "flinging" by Valve.^[9] As GLaDOS puts it, "In layman's terms: speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out."

Although Chell is equipped with mechanized heel springs to prevent damage from falling,^[9] she can be killed by various other hazards in the test chambers, such as turret guns, bouncing balls of energy, and electrified toxic liquid. She can also be damaged by objects falling through portals, and by a series of "crushers" that appear in certain levels. Unlike most action games, there is no visible amount of health; Chell dies if she is dealt a certain amount of damage in a short time period, but returns to full health fairly quickly.

The portal gun allows several possible approaches to completing the various test chambers. In their initial preview of Portal, GameSpot noted that many solutions exist for completing each puzzle, and that the gameplay "gets even crazier, and the diagrams shown in the trailer showed some incredibly crazy things that you can attempt".^[11] Two additional modes are unlocked during the completion of the game that challenge the player to work out these alternative methods of solving each test chamber. Challenge maps are unlocked near the halfway point and Advanced Chambers are unlocked when the game is completed.^[12] In Challenge mode, levels are revisited, with the added goal of completing the test chamber either with as little time, with the least number of portals, or with the fewest footsteps possible. In Advanced mode, certain levels are made more complex with the addition of more obstacles and hazards.^[13][14] The game also features a number of Achievements the player can earn by completing tasks. Achievements range from normal gameplay requirements, such as obtaining the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, to various tricks, such as using portals to jump a spectacular distance.

As with other Source engine games since Half-Life 2, Portal can be played with commentary enabled; special icons will appear in the game which the player can activate to hear how certain parts of the game were developed.

Characters

Chell, the player-controlled protagonist, views herself holding the Portal Gun through the portals she has created. She is equipped with heel springs on her legs to prevent injury from falls.

The game features only two characters: the silent player-controlled protagonist, named Chell (as revealed by the credits), and GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, voiced by Ellen McLain), a computer artificial intelligence that monitors and directs the player. The only background information presented about Chell is given by GLaDOS; the credibility of these facts (such as Chell being adopted and having no friends) is dubious as GLaDOS, by her own admission, is a liar.^[15]

Setting

Portal takes place in the "Enrichment Center" for "Aperture Science Laboratories", the research corporation responsible for the creation of the Handheld Portal Device. Information about the company is revealed during the game and also via the real-world website.^[16]

According to the Aperture Science website, the company was founded in 1953 by Cave Johnson for the sole purpose of making shower curtains for the U.S. military. However, after becoming mentally unstable from mercury poisoning in 1978, Johnson created a "three tier" research and development plan to make his organization successful. The first two tiers, the "Heimlich Counter-Maneuver" and the "Take-A-Wish Foundation", were commercial failures and led to an investigation of the company by the U.S. Senate. However, when the investigative committee heard of the success of the third tier, a "man-sized ad-hoc quantum tunnel through physical space with possible applications as a shower curtain", they recessed permanently and gave Aperture Science an open-ended contract to continue their research. The development of GLaDOS, the "Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System" (an "artificially intelligent research assistant and disk operating system"), began in 1986 in response to Black Mesa's work on similar portal technology.^[17] A presentation seen during gameplay reveals that GLaDOS was also included in a proposed bid for de-icing fuel lines, incorporated as a "fully functional disk-operation system" which is "arguably alive", unlike Black Mesa's proposal which "inhibits ice, nothing more."^[18] Roughly thirteen years later, work on GLaDOS is completed and the untested AI is activated during the company's first annual bring-your-daughter-to-work day. The record ends at that point on a positive note.

The portions of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center that Chell explores suggest that it is part of a massive research installation. At the time of events depicted in Portal, the Aperture Science Enrichment Center facility seems to be long deserted, although most of its equipment remains operational without human control.^[19] Though Aperture Science exists in the Half-Life universe,^[11] it is unclear when these events take place in that time-line. At one point, GLaDOS states that "the world has changed since [the player] last left the building", claiming to be the only thing standing between "us" and "them", yet does not elaborate on the details.

The apparent abandonment of the facility may not have been entirely intentional on the part of the Aperture Science staff. In the final area of the game, a red phone with a severed wire sits on a desk near the chamber housing GLaDOS' hardware, which the in-game commentary reveals was meant to be used by Aperture employees as a way to make an emergency call in case GLaDOS began taking over the facility. The commentator then notes that, clearly, this fail-safe did not work as planned.^[9] In the game, GLaDOS claims to have flooded the facility with a deadly neurotoxin before the Aperture employees installed her morality core.

Aperture Science, Inc. is also mentioned during Half-Life 2: Episode Two, in which the icebreaker ship Borealis, belonging to the corporation, is said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances, along with part of its drydock. During its development, Half-Life 2 featured a chapter set on the Borealis, but this was abandoned and removed before release.^[20]

[edit] Plot

Portal's plot is revealed to the player via audio messages from GLaDOS and side rooms found in the later levels. The game begins with Chell waking up from a stasis bed and hearing instructions and warnings from GLaDOS about the upcoming test experience. This part of the game involves distinct "test chambers" that, in sequence, introduce players to the game's mechanics. GLaDOS's announcements serve not only to instruct Chell and help her progress through the game, but also to create atmosphere and develop the AI as a character.^[9] Chell is promised cake and grief counseling as her reward if she manages to complete all the test chambers.^[21]

A typical Portal level with both of the player's colored portals opened. The Weighted Companion Cube can also be seen.

Chell proceeds through the empty Enrichment Center, only interacting with GLaDOS. Over the course of the game, GLaDOS's motives are hinted to be more sinister than her helpful demeanor suggests. Although she is designed to appear helpful and encouraging, GLaDOS's actions and speech suggest insincerity and callous disregard for the safety and well-being of the test subjects. The test chambers become increasingly dangerous as Chell proceeds, and GLaDOS even directs Chell through "a live-fire course designed for military androids" due to the usual test chamber being "under repair". In another chamber, GLaDOS boasts about the fidelity and importance of the "Weighted Companion Cube", a waist-high crate with a single large pink heart on each face, for helping Chell to complete the chamber, but then declares that it "unfortunately must be euthanized" in an "emergency intelligence incinerator" before Chell can continue.^[19] Some of the later chambers include automated turrets with child-like voices that fire upon Chell, only to sympathize with her after being disabled ("I don't blame you." and "No hard feelings.").^[15][22]

After Chell completes the final test chamber, GLaDOS congratulates her and prepares her "victory candescence" where she slowly lowers Chell on a moving platform into a pit of fire. As GLaDOS assures her that "all Aperture technologies remain safely operational up to 4000 degrees Kelvin", Chell escapes with the use of the portal gun and makes her way through the maintenance areas within the Enrichment Center. Throughout this section, GLaDOS still sends messages to Chell and it becomes clear that GLaDOS has become corrupt and may have killed everyone else in the center, or that there never were any at the start of the game. Chell makes her way through the maintenance areas and empty office spaces behind the chambers. Now, instead of guidance from GLaDOS, graffiti messages point Chell in the right direction. These "backstage" areas, which are in extreme disrepair, stand in stark contrast to the pristine test chambers. The graffiti includes statements such as "the cake is a lie" and pastiches of Emily Dickinson's poem "The Chariot" and "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Reaper and the Flowers", mourning the death of the companion cube.^[9]

GLaDOS attempts to dissuade Chell with threats of physical harm and misleading statements claiming that she is going the wrong way as Chell makes her way deeper into the maintenance areas. Eventually, Chell reaches a large chamber where GLaDOS's hardware hangs overhead. GLaDOS continues to plead with Chell, but during the exchange one of GLaDOS' core chips falls off. Chell drops it in an incinerator, and GLaDOS reveals that Chell has just destroyed the "morality core", which the Aperture Science employees allegedly installed after GLaDOS "flooded the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin", and goes on to state that now there is nothing to prevent her from doing so once again. A six-minute countdown starts as Chell dislodges and incinerates more pieces of GLaDOS, while GLaDOS attempts to discourage her with a series of taunts and increasingly juvenile insults. After she has destroyed the final piece, a portal malfunction tears the room apart and transports everything to the surface. Chell lands outside the gates of the facility amid the rubble of GLaDOS.

The final scene, after a long and speedy zoom through the bowels of the facility, shows a mix of shelves surrounding a Black Forest cake^[23] and the Weighted Companion Cube. The shelves contain various metallic spheres, some of which begin to light up before a robotic arm descends and extinguishes the candle on the cake. The credits roll, and GLaDOS delivers a concluding report about Chell: the song "Still Alive".^[24]

[edit] Development

[edit] Concept

Portal is Valve's spiritual successor to the freeware game Narbacular Drop, the 2005 independent game released by students of the DigiPen Institute of Technology; the original Narbacular Drop team is now employed at Valve.^[25][26] Certain elements have been retained from Narbacular Drop, such as the system of identifying the two unique portal endpoints with the colors orange and blue. A key difference in the signature portal mechanic between the two games however is that Portal's "portal gun" cannot create a portal through an existing portal unlike in Narbacular Drop. Portal took approximately two years and four months to complete after the DigiPen team was brought into Valve,^[27] and no more than ten people were involved with its development.^[28] Portal writer Erik Wolpaw, who along with fellow writer Chet Faliszek of the classic gaming commentary/comedy website Old Man Murray were hired by Valve for the game, noted that "Without the constraints, Portal would not be as good a game."^[29]

The Portal team worked with Half-Life series writer Marc Laidlaw on fitting the game into the series' plot.^[30] Wolpaw and Faliszek were put to work on the dialogue for Portal.^[26] GLaDOS was central to the plot, as Wolpaw notes "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."^[31] Wolpaw further describes the idea of using cake as the reward came about as "at the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about 15 minutes of silence and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake."^[31]

[edit] Design

The austere settings in the game came about because testers were found to spend too much time trying to complete the puzzles using decorative but non-functional elements. As a result, the setting was minimised to make the usable aspects of the puzzle easier to spot, using the clinical feel of the setting in the film The Island as reference.^[32] While there were plans for a third area, an office space, to be included after the test chambers and the maintenance areas, the team ran out of time to include it.^[32] They also dropped the introduction of the "Rat Man", the character that left the messages in the maintenance areas to avoid creating too much narrative for the game.^[33] According to Swift, the final battle with GLaDOS went through many iterations, including having the player chased by "James Bond lasers", which was partially applied to the turrets, "Portal Kombat" where the player would have needed to redirect rockets while avoiding turret fire, and a chase sequence following a fleeing GLaDOS. Eventually, they found that playtesters enjoyed a rather simple puzzle with a countdown timer near the end; Swift noted that "Time pressure makes people think something is a lot more complicated than it really is", and Wolpaw admitted that "it was really cheap to make [the neurotoxin gas]" in order to simplify the dialogue during the battle.^[28]

Chell's face and body are modeled after Alésia Glidewell, an American freelance actor and voice over artist, selected by Valve from a local modeling agency for her face and body structure.^[27][34] Ellen McLain provided the voice of the antagonist GLaDOS. Erik Wolpaw noted that "When we were still fishing around for the turret voice, Ellen did a 'sultry' version. It didn't work for the turrets, but we liked it a lot, and so a slightly modified version of that became the model for GLaDOS's final incarnation."^[31] Mike Patton's voice also appears in the game performing the growling and snarling of the final core-chip of GLaDOS. The Weighted Companion Cube inspiration was from project lead Kim Swift with additional input from Wolpaw from reading some "declassified government interrogation thing" whereby "isolation leads subjects to begin to attach to inanimate objects";^[31][28] Swift commented that "We had a long level called Box Marathon; we wanted players to bring this box with them from the beginning to the end. But people would forget about the box, so we added dialogue, applied the heart to the cube, and continued to up the ante until people became attached to the box. Later on, we added the incineration idea. The artistic expression grew from the gameplay."^[32] Swift noted that reported comparisons to both the Milgram experiment and 2001: A Space Odyssey are happenstance.^[32] The portal gun's full name "Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device" can be abbreviated as "ASHPD", which was, by coincidence, similar to the name of the protagonist Adrian Shephard of Half-Life: Opposing Force; as a result, the team placed a red herring in the game by having the letters of "Adrian Sheppard" highlighted on keyboards found in the office-space areas within the game.^[32] According to Kim Swift, the cake is a Black Forest cake which she "thought looked the best" at the nearby Regent Bakery and Café.^[35]

[edit] Soundtrack

The popularity of the Weighted Companion Cube has led Valve to create merchandise for the "character", including fuzzy dice.

Most of the game's soundtrack is composed of non-lyrical ambient music, somewhat dark and mysterious to match the mood of the environments. The closing credits song, "Still Alive", was written by Jonathan Coulton and sung by Ellen McLain as the GLaDOS character. Wolpaw notes that Coulton was invited to Valve a year before the release of Portal as the team knew they wanted to involve Coulton in some fashion; "Once Kim [Swift] and I met with him, it quickly became apparent that he had the perfect sensibility to write a song for GLaDOS."^[31][24] The song was released as a free downloadable song for the music video game Rock Band on March 31, 2008; the game lists GLaDOS, not Ellen McLain or Jonathan Coulton, as the artist.^[36][37][38] The soundtrack for Portal was released as a part of The Orange Box Original Soundtrack^[39] and includes both GLaDOS' in-game rendition and Coulton's vocal mix of "Still Alive". A brief instrumental version done in a Latin style can be heard playing over radios in-game.

[edit] Merchandise

The popularity of the game and of its characters has led Valve to develop merchandise for Portal made available through their online Steam store. One of the more popular items were the Weighted Companion Cube plush toys and fuzzy dice;^[40] both were sold out in under 24 hours.^[41] Other products include t-shirts and Aperture Science coffee mugs and parking stickers.

Valve released a special demo version, entitled Portal: The First Slice, free for any Steam user using Nvidia graphics hardware as part of a collaboration between the two companies.^[42] It also comes packaged with Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Peggle Extreme, and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast. The demo includes the first twelve test chambers. Valve has since made the demo available to all Steam users.^[43]