Portal (series)

One of the in-game logos for Aperture

Both Portal games take place in the fictional "Aperture Science Enrichment Center". Aperture Science was founded by Cave Johnson (voiced by J.K. Simmons) and originally sought to make shower curtains for the military. Its research happened upon the discovery of portal technology, and soon became a direct competitor with Black Mesa Research Facility (from the Half-Life series) for government funding. Johnson acquired the rights to a disused salt mine in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where they started building a labyrinthine set of offices, laboratories, facilities, and test chambers. During this time, Johnson became poisoned from exposure to moon dust, a key component of the paint needed for the portal placing technology, and became increasingly deranged.

In Portal 2, the player explores these long-abandoned areas of Aperture, learning that the company had moved from testing on the country's finest, to paid volunteers, and ultimately to forcing its own employees to participate in testing. Near the point of his death, Johnson ordered his lifelong assistant Caroline (voiced by Ellen McLain) to be the first test subject for a mind-to-computer transfer; her personality would ultimately form the core of GLaDOS (also McLain). Sometime after Johnson's death, the old sections of the facility were vitrified, and a more modern facility built atop those ruins. GLaDOS was built to control the facility and monitor the tests, but researchers found that the computer had villainous tendencies, threatening to kill the entire staff before it was shut down in time. The Aperture researchers constructed a number of "personality cores" that would fit onto GLaDOS to prevent her from turning against them. Despite this, on the day she was officially activated (coincidentally on "Take Your Daughter to Work Day"), she turned against the researchers and killed nearly everyone in the facility with lethal doses of neurotoxin gas. In the games and the comic Lab Rat, one employee Doug Rattmann survived due to his schizophrenia and distrust of GLaDOS. In trying to find a way to defeat GLaDOS, he finds that Chell, one of the human subjects kept in cryogenic storage within Aperture, has a high level of tenacity, and arranges for the events of Portal to occur by moving her to the top of GLaDOS' testing list. GLaDOS remains driven to test human subjects despite the lack of humans.

A promotional poster created by Valve artist Tristan Reidford, showcasing the characters from Portal. From center top clockwise: Chell, GLaDOS, P-Body (left) and Atlas, the turrets, Cave Johnson (in picture frame), a Companion Cube, and Wheatley

The player is introduced to Aperture in Portal, which is said by Valve to be set sometime between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. The player-character Chell is awakened by GLaDOS for testing. Chell resists GLaDOS' lies and verbal ploys and succeeds to defeat GLaDOS' core, the destruction creating a portal implosion that sends Chell to the surface, unconscious. Rattmann, who has helped Chell by writing warning messages and directions to maintenance areas on the facility walls and had observed the final battle, escapes Aperture, but on witnessing a robot dragging Chell's body back inside, sacrifices his escape to assure that Chell is put into indefinite cryogenic storage. He himself is critically wounded but appears to make it to another cryogenic chamber, though his ultimate fate is not revealed.

Portal 2 takes place numerous years after the events of the first game; the Aperture facility has fallen into disrepair without GLaDOS. A personality core named Wheatley (Stephen Merchant) wakes Chell from her sleep to help her stop a reactor failure, but inadvertently awakens GLaDOS, who had backed up her personality. Though they defeat GLaDOS by putting Wheatley in her place, Wheatley is overwhelmed with power, sending Chell and GLaDOS, temporarily reduced to a small computer powered by a potato, to the old core of Aperture, where GLaDOS rediscovers her relation to Caroline. They return to the surface where they are forced to defeat Wheatley before his ineptitude with the Aperture systems causes the facility reactors to become critical and explode. GLaDOS is returned to her rightful place and returns the facility to normal. GLaDOS then lets Chell go, realizing that the prospect of trying to kill her is too much trouble. Instead, she turns to two robots of her own creation, Atlas and P-Body, to locate a mythical store of additional human subjects kept in cryogenic sleep for her to continue testing on.

In addition to these characters, the game includes numerous laser-seeking turrets that seek to kill the player-characters, though are apologetic for it; most are voiced by McLain, though some defective ones in the sequel are voiced by Nolan North. GLaDOS introduces Chell to the "Weighted Companion Cube", appearing similar to other Weighed Cubes (crates) in the game, but decorated with hearts on its sides; GLaDOS attempts to make Chell believe the Companion Cube is a sentient object and a key to her survival, before making Chell dispose of it in an incinerator prior to leaving a test chamber. Both games feature other personality cores that were constructed to keep GLaDOS in check; the first game includes three cores, the Morality, Curiosity, and Intelligence Cores, voiced by McLain as well as a snarling Anger Core voiced by Mike Patton. In Portal 2, three more such cores (beyond Wheatley) are introduced including the irrelevant Fact Core, the bold Adventure Core, and the space-obsessed Space Core, each voiced by North.

Two examples of "flinging" using portals within Portal. On the left, the player has placed portals on the floor of the pit and the wall above; by jumping into the blue one in the pit, they will exit the orange one with the same speed, clearing the pit and landing on the other side. On the right, the player has initially placed the blue portal in the pit and the orange on the wall; after jumping into the blue and exiting the orange (red path), they use the portal gun to place the second blue one on the ledge, gaining more momentum before falling into it and exiting the orange portal with more velocity (green track) as to land on the higher platform.

The player controls the main character (Chell in the single player campaigns, or one of Atlas and P-Body in the cooperative mode) from a first-person view, running, jumping, and interacting with switches or other devices. The player-characters are able to withstand large drops, but can be killed by falling in the toxic water of the facility, crushed to death, passing through laser grids, or fired on repeatedly by turrets.

Both games are generally divided into a series of test chambers; other sections of the game are more exploratory areas that connect these chambers. Each chamber has an exit door that must be reached, often requiring that certain conditions have been met such as having weighed down a large button with a "Weighted Cube", effectively a crate. These puzzles require the use of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, the portal gun. The gun can shoot two portals, colored differently for identification, on any flat surface that is painted with a specific paint containing moon dust. Once both portal ends are placed, the player can walk the character between them, or carry objects with the portal gun through them. Portal ends can be re positioned as often as necessary, but certain actions, such as walking through "emancipation grills" or moving a surface with a portal will cause the portals to dissipate.

A critical feature of portals is that they retain the speed of the object traveling through it; as stated by GLaDOS to the player in the first game, "Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out". When portals are placed on non-parallel planes, this can create the effect of "flinging". Commonly, one uses gravity to build up their momentum when they fall into a portal, which flings them out of the other side to gain speed and distance that normal jumping and running could not generate. A leapfrogging effect can be used by placing portals in series during this flinging, gaining further momentum with each use.

Portals will also allow light and other objects to transfer through them, and numerous puzzles involve using portals to manipulate bouncing energy balls, lasers, "hard light" bridges, and tractor beams to access new locations or direct objects to specific receptacles that must be activated to open the level's exit. Portal 2 introduces "mobility gels" that can paint surfaces, including turrets and cubes, that can also move through portals though not directly by the player. The gels can create a surface that repels the player (Repulsion Gel), increases the player's speed (Propulsion Gel), or allows the surface to accept portals (Conversion Gel).

The concept of Portal came from Narbacular Drop, a student project from the DigiPen Institute of Technology. The game included the aspects of placing portals on any flat surfaces and using them to maneuver around levels.[1][2] Valve's employees, attending a DigiPen career fair, saw their game and shortly later offered the entire team jobs at Valve to help expand on their idea.[3]

Valve originally saw Portal as an experimental game to be included with its upcoming compilation, The Orange Box, alongside its release of Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2.[4] To give the game character, a minimal story, tied loosely with the Half-Life world, was written by Valve's Erik Wolpaw and Marc Laidlaw.[5] They needed a character to guide the player through the game, coming onto a polite but humorous artificial intelligence, which would ultimately become the character of GLaDOS.[5]

Portal's release with The Orange Box received near-universal praise, with the standalone game earning an aggregate Metacritic rating of 90 out of 100.[6] With success of the game, work on an expanded sequel began nearly immediately, expanding the development team from 8 to about 30-40 programmers.[7] Initial ideas for Portal 2 retained the idea of solving puzzles through scientific concepts, but eliminating the use of portals altogether; these versions did not fare well with test audiences nor with Gabe Newell, Valve's president; these ideas were dropped though saved for potential reuse in a different game by Valve.[8] Portal 2 development was restarted specifically to keep the portal concept but adding new elements to freshen the gameplay.[9][10]

During this period, Valve had witnessed another student project out of Digipen, Tag: The Power of Paint which allows the player to spray paint onto surfaces to alter their behavior, and brought them into Valve, though not initially as part of the Portal.[7] The Tag team had found a way to incorporate their paints with real-time fluid dynamics code previously made by Valve, and soon their concept for paints had become the "conversion gels" as part of Portal 2.[11][12][13][14]

Valve included a co-operative play mode, based on their own observations and stories from players about working out the solutions to Portal's puzzles in a group environment.[7][11][15] With this feature, they sought the ability to enable cross-platform play of Portal 2 between computers and consoles through Steamworks. This led to a surprise reveal by Newell that not only would Portal 2 be on the PlayStation 3 platform, after previously stating the difficulties in supporting this console, but that it would include support for cross-platform play between personal computers and PlayStation 3 players through a limited Steamworks interface.[10][16] Valve brought in writer Jay Pinkerton formerly with National Lampoon, and Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek to assist Wolpaw with the larger story. They built on the character of the Aperture Science facility, providing a deeper story for GLaDOS and Aperture's CEO Cave Johnson, as well as developing several concepts for "personality cores" ultimately to the creation of the Wheatley core character.[8][17]

Portal 2 was similarly released with high praise with a 95 out of 100 score on Metacritic.[18] Valve has continued to support the game through the release of two separate downloadable content packages, one introducing a new co-operative campaign,[19][20] and a second that incorporated an easy-to-learn level editor that allowed players to make their own test chambers and share these through the Steam Workshop to others.[21] Further on this, Valve has created a special version of the Portal level editor to be used alongside its "Steam in Schools" program as a means of using the game and editor to teach students about physics, math, and other lessons; Valve released this version of Portal 2 free for educational use.[22] Exploring options for a full-scale VR game in 2017, Valve experimented with Portal, but found the portal systems disorienting in VR; instead, they returned to the Half-Life series and released Half-Life: Alyx in 2020.[23]

In April 2022, Erik Wolpaw urged Valve to make Portal 3 saying "I am also not getting any younger. We are reaching the point where - it's crazy to think – [we're ] literally going to be too old to work on Portal 3. So we should just do it."[24] In September, Ellen McLain also called for Portal 3 saying she was willing to star in it and asked fans to: "Write in. Email Valve. You've got my blessing,"[25]

The Portal games have found application in educational aspects outside of game development. The first game was praised as an example of instructional scaffolding where the student is first given an environment to learn new tools with sufficient hand-holding, but these facets are slowly removed as the student proceeds.[83] At least one college, Wabash College, introduced Portal as part of required coursework; at Wabash, the game is used as an example of Erving Goffman's dissemination on dramaturgy, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.[84][85][86]

At a mid-2011 presentation at the 2011 Games for Change Festival at New York University, Gabe Newell stated Valve's intention to direct Portal and Portal 2 towards education. Newell stated that Valve "doesn't see divide between making a game that can do well and be educational", and was already working with schools to develop lesson plans around the game.[87] In one example, Valve brought in students from nearby Evergreen School to watch them interact with the game in an educational setting.[88] As part of this effect, the company promoted Portal for free use by any user during September 2011.[89]

In speaking at the 2012 Games for Change Festival, Newell said that the response to these efforts was praised by educators.[90] Their efforts culminated in a "Teach with Portals" program that Newell announced at the Festival. The effort is built on a standalone "Puzzle Maker" that incorporates the level editor for Portal 2 that was released as free content for the game in early 2012. Valve had built the Puzzle Maker with the aid of educators, as to make it suitable for lesson plans as well as making it as easy for teachers to use to construct such plans. The Puzzle Maker is not limited to physics, but designed to be modular so that other fields, such as fundamental electronics or chemistry, could be included.[90] The "Teach with Portals" initiative is built atop of a stripped-down version of the Steam client, "Steam for Schools", that is designed to be used in schools, allowing instructors to control the installation of the games and lesson plans on the students' computers. These tools, as well as copies of Portal 2 and the Puzzle Maker, are being offered for free for all educators.[90]

In February 2013, Valve president Gabe Newell and film director J. J. Abrams announced that they were to collaborate on a film adaptation of the Portal series.[91][92] In 2016, Abrams stated that the film was in the scriptwriting stage.[93] Abrams confirmed in May 2021 that the film adaptation was still in the works as they were still working on a script for the film from Warner Bros. Pictures.[94]

Several elements of the Portal series have entered popular culture, typically as bases for Internet memes.

• During Portal, the player explores areas outside of the test chambers where scrawled messages left by Rattmann and others warn of GLaDOS' deception. In particular, while GLaDOS promises that Chell will receive cake for completing the training courses, the messages alert that this reward does not exist, and that "the cake is a lie". The phrase became an Internet meme, leading to numerous cake-related jokes, as well as its adaption as a term relating to a false promise. When writing Portal 2, Wolpaw stated that they were so sick of cake jokes that they purposely avoided any reference to them, save for one subtle nod.[95]
• In one Portal level, the player is given an inanimate weighted cube with hearts on all sides, called the "Weighted Companion Cube" by GLaDOS. GLaDOS proceeds to assert that the cube is not alive and that it cannot speak, GLaDOS encourages Chell to ignore the cube in the event that it does speak. The player is required to use the Weighted Companion Cube to complete the level, but to exit the level, the player must then drop the Cube into an incinerator. The Weighted Companion Cube became a popular item to include on Portal-themed merchandise.
• Portal's credit sequence plays over the song "Still Alive", composed by Jonathan Coulton, and, in its original form, sung by Ellen McLain in the GLaDOS voice. The song, sung from GLaDOS's point of view as considering her defeat as "a success", contributed to the positive response of the game as well as highlight Coulton's work to players, and leading to Valve bringing back Coulton to record a credits song for Portal 2.[96]
• The portal gun is one of several weapons used alongside ones from other game and film franchises in a climactic fight for the 2021 film Free Guy which takes place within a video game.[97]
• In 2022, GEICO released a commercial entitled "The Gecko Visits Portal", featuring elements from the Portal games such as an unreleased test chamber shown in trailers for Portal 2, with McLain reprising her role as GLaDOS.[98]

• Official website