| Portal | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer | Valve[a] |
| Publisher | Valve |
| Designer | Kim Swift |
| Writers | |
| Composers | |
| Series | Portal |
| Engine | Source |
| Platforms | |
| Release | |
| Genre | Puzzle-platform |
| Mode | Single-player |
Portal is a 2007puzzle-platform game developed and published byValve. It was originally released in abundle,The Orange Box, forWindows,Xbox 360 andPlayStation 3, and has been since ported to other systems, includingMac OS X,Linux,Android (viaNvidia Shield), andNintendo Switch.
Portal consists primarily of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player's character and simple objects using the "Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device", also referred to as the "portal gun", a device that can create intra-dimensional portals between two flat planes. The player-character,Chell, is challenged and taunted by anartificial intelligence construct namedGLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform andDisk Operating System) to complete each puzzle in theAperture Science Enrichment Center using the portal gun with the promise of receiving cake when all the puzzles are completed. TheSource Engine'sphysics system allows kinetic energy to be retained through portals, requiring creative use of portals to maneuver through the test chambers. This gameplay element is based on a similar concept from the gameNarbacular Drop; many of the team members from theDigiPen Institute of Technology who worked onNarbacular Drop were hired by Valve for the creation ofPortal, making it aspiritual successor to the game.
Portal was acclaimed as one of the most original games of 2007, despite some criticism for its short duration. It received praise for its originality, unique gameplay and a dark story andsense of comedy. GLaDOS, voiced byEllen McLain in the English-language version, received acclaim for her unique characterization, and the end credits song "Still Alive", written byJonathan Coulton for the game, was praised for its original composition and humor.Portal is often cited as one of thegreatest video games ever made. Excluding Steam download sales, over four million copies of the game have been sold since its release, spawning official merchandise from Valve including a model portal gun and plushCompanion Cubes, as well as fan recreations ofthe cake.
A standalone version with extra puzzles,Portal: Still Alive, was also published by Valve on theXbox Live Arcade service in October 2008 exclusively for Xbox 360. A sequel,Portal 2, was released in 2011, which expanded on the storyline, added several gameplay mechanics, and included a cooperative multiplayer mode. A port for theNintendo Switch was released as part of thePortal: Companion Collection in June 2022.
InPortal, the player controls the protagonist,Chell, from afirst-person perspective as she is challenged to navigate through a series of test chambers using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, or portal gun, under the supervision of the artificial intelligenceGLaDOS. The portal gun can create two distinct portal ends, orange and blue. The portals create a visual and physical connection between two different locations inthree-dimensional space. Neither end is specifically an entrance or exit; all objects that travel through one portal will exit through the other. An important aspect of the game's physics is momentum redirection and conservation.[4] As moving objects pass through portals, they come through the exit portal at the same direction that the exit portal is facing and with the same speed with which they passed through the entrance portal.[5] For example, a common maneuver is to place a portal some distance below the player on the floor, jump down through it, gaining speed in freefall, and emerge through the other portal on a wall, flying over a gap or another obstacle. This process of gaining speed and then redirecting that speed towards another area of a puzzle allows the player to launch objects or Chell over great distances both vertically and horizontally. This is referred to as 'flinging' by Valve.[4] As GLaDOS puts it, "In layman's terms: speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out." If portal ends are not on parallel planes, the character passing through is reoriented to be upright with respect to gravity after leaving a portal end.[citation needed]
Chell and all other objects in the game that can fit into the portal ends will pass through the portal. However, a portal shot cannot pass through an open portal; it will simply fizzle or create a new portal in an offset position. Creating a portal end instantly fizzles an existing portal end of the same color. Moving objects, glass, non-white surfaces, liquids, or areas that are too small will not be able to anchor portals. Chell is often provided with cubes that she can pick up and use to climb on or to place on large buttons that open doors or activate mechanisms. Particle fields, known as "Emancipation Grills", occasionally called "Fizzlers" in the developer commentary, exist at the end of all and within some test chambers; when passed through, they will deactivate (fizzle) any active portals and disintegrate any object carried through. These fields also block attempts to fire portals through them.[6]
Although Chell is equipped with mechanized heel springs to prevent damage from falling,[4] she can be killed by various other hazards in the test chambers, such as turrets, bouncing balls of energy, and toxic liquid. She can also be killed by objects hitting her at high speeds, and by a series of crushers that appear in certain levels. Unlike most action games at the time, there is nohealth indicator; Chell dies if she is dealt a certain amount of damage in a short period, but returns to full health fairly quickly. Some obstacles, such as the energy balls and crushing pistons, deal fatal damage with a single blow.[citation needed]
Many solutions exist for completing each puzzle.[7] Two additional modes are unlocked upon the completion of the game that challenge the player to work out alternative methods of solving each test chamber. Challenge chambers are unlocked near the halfway point and Advanced Chambers are unlocked when the game is completed.[8] In Challenge chambers, levels are revisited with the added goal of completing the test chamber either with as little time, with the fewest portals, or with the fewest footsteps possible. In Advanced chambers, certain levels are made more complex with the addition of more obstacles and hazards.[9][10]
The game features two characters: theplayer-controlledsilent protagonist namedChell, andGLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform andDisk Operating System), a computerartificial intelligence that monitors and directs the player. In the English-language version, GLaDOS is voiced byEllen McLain, though her voice has been altered to sound more artificial. The only background information presented about Chell is given by GLaDOS; the credibility of these facts, such as Chell being adopted, an orphan, and having no friends, is questionable at best, as GLaDOS is a liar by her own admission. In the "Lab Rat" comic created by Valve to bridge the gap betweenPortal andPortal 2, Chell's records reveal she was ultimately rejected as a test subject for having "too much tenacity"—the main reason Doug Rattmann, a former employee of Aperture Science, moved Chell to the top of the test queue.[11][12]
Portal takes place in theHalf-Life universe and inside ofAperture Science Laboratories Computer-Aided Enrichment Center, a research facility responsible for the creation of the portal gun. Information about Aperture Science, developed by Valve for creating the setting of the game, is revealed during the game and via the real-world promotional website.[13] According to the Aperture Science website,Cave Johnson founded the company in 1943 for the sole purpose of makingshower curtains for the U.S. military. However, after becoming mentally unstable from "moon rock poisoning" in 1978, Johnson created a three-tierresearch and development plan to make his organization successful. The first two tiers, theCounter-Heimlich Maneuver (a maneuver designed to ensure choking) and theTake-A-Wish Foundation (a program to give the wishes of terminally ill children to adults in need of dreams), were commercial failures and led to an investigation of the company by theU.S. Senate. However, when the investigative committee heard of the success of the third tier—a person-sized, ad hoc quantum tunnel through physical space, with a possible application as a shower curtain—it recessed permanently and gave Aperture Science an open-ended contract to continue its research. The development of GLaDOS, an artificially intelligent research assistant and disk-operating system, began in 1986 in response toBlack Mesa's work on similar portal technology.[14]
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 that is arguably alive, unlike Black Mesa's proposal, which inhibits ice, nothing more.[15] Roughly thirteen years later, work on GLaDOS was completed and the untested AI was activated during the company's first annualbring-your-daughter-to-work day in 1998.[13] Immediately after activation, the facility was flooded with deadly neurotoxin by the AI. Events of the firstHalf-Life game occur shortly after that, presumably leaving the facility forgotten by the outside world due to apocalyptic happenings. Wolpaw, in describing the ending ofPortal 2, affirmed that theCombine invasion, chronologically taking place afterHalf-Life and beforeHalf-Life 2, had occurred beforePortal 2's events.[16]
The areas of the Enrichment Center that Chell explores suggest that it is part of a massive research installation. At the time of events depicted inPortal, the facility seems to be long-deserted, although most of its equipment remains operational without human control.[17]
The game begins with Chell waking up from a stasis bed and hearing instructions fromGLaDOS, anartificial intelligence, about upcoming tests. Chell enters into sequential distinct chambers that introduce her to varying challenges to solve using her portal gun, with GLaDOS as her only interaction.[4] GLaDOS promises cake as a reward for Chell if she completes all the test chambers.[18] As Chell nears completion, GLaDOS's motives and behavior turn more sinister, suggesting insincerity and callous disregard for the safety and well-being of test subjects. The test chambers become increasingly dangerous as Chell proceeds, including a live-fire course designed for military androids, as well as chambers flooded with a hazardous liquid. In one chamber, GLaDOS forces Chell to "euthanize" aWeighted Companion Cube in anincinerator, after Chell uses it for assistance.[17][19][20]
After Chell completes the final test chamber, GLaDOS maneuvers Chell into an incinerator in an attempt to kill her. Chell escapes with the portal gun and makes her way through the maintenance areas within the Enrichment Center.[21] GLaDOS panics and insists that she was pretending to kill Chell as part of testing, while it becomes clear that GLaDOS had previously killed all the inhabitants of the center.[11][12] Chell travels further through the maintenance areas, discovering dilapidated backstage areas covered in graffiti that includes statements such as "the cake is a lie", andpastiches of quotes from famous poets such asHenry Wadsworth Longfellow andEmily Brontë.[4]
Despite GLaDOS's attempts to dissuade her with lies and threats, Chell proceeds and eventually confronts GLaDOS in a large chamber where her hardware hangs overhead. A sphere soon falls from GLaDOS and Chell drops it in an incinerator. GLaDOS reveals that the sphere was the morality core of her conscience, one of multiple personality cores that Aperture Science employees installed after she flooded the center with neurotoxin gas; with the core removed, she can access the neurotoxin emitters again. A six-minute countdown starts as Chell dislodges and incinerates more of GLaDOS' personality cores, while GLaDOS mocks and attacks her. After Chell destroys the last personality core, a malfunction tears the room apart and transports everything to the surface. Chell lies outside the facility's gates amid the remains of GLaDOS, but is promptly dragged away by an unseen robotic entity.[b]
The final scene, viewed within the bowels of the facility, shows a candlelitBlack Forest cake,[23] and a Weighted Companion Cube, surrounded by shelves containing dozens of inactive personality cores. The cores begin to light up, before a robotic arm descends and extinguishes the candle on the cake, casting the room into darkness.[24] Over the credits, GLaDOS delivers a concluding report through the song "Still Alive", declaring the experiment to be a success.[25]
Portal began with the 2005 freeware gameNarbacular Drop, developed by students of theDigiPen Institute of Technology.[26][27]Robin Walker, one of Valve's developers, saw the game at the DigiPen's career fair. Impressed, he contacted the team with advice and offered to show their game at Valve's offices. After their presentation, Valve's presidentGabe Newell offered the team jobs at Valve to develop the game further.[28] Newell said he was impressed with the team as "they had actually carried the concept through", already having included the interaction between portals and physics, completing most of the work that Valve would have had to commit on their own.[28]
To test the effectiveness of the portal mechanic, the team made a prototype in an in-house 2D game engine that is used in DigiPen.[29] Certain elements were retained fromNarbacular Drop, such as the system of identifying the two unique portal endpoints with the colors orange and blue. A key difference is thatPortal's portal gun cannot create a portal through an existing portal, unlike inNarbacular Drop. The original setting, of a princess trying to escape a dungeon, was dropped in favor of the Aperture Science approach.[28]Portal took approximately two years and four months to complete after the DigiPen team was brought into Valve,[30] and no more than ten people were involved with its development.[31]
For the first year of development, the team focused mostly on the gameplay without narrative structure.Playtesters found the game fun but asked about what these test chambers were leading towards. This prompted the team to come up with a narrative forPortal.[32]
The team worked withMarc Laidlaw, the writer of the Valve'sHalf-Life series, to fitPortal into theHalf-Life universe.[33] This was done in part because of the project's limited art resources; instead of creating new art assets forPortal, the team reused theHalf-Life 2 assets.[15] Laidlaw opposed the crossover, feeling it "made both universes smaller", and said later: "I just had to react as gracefully as I could to the fact that it was going there without me. It didn't make any sense except from a resource-restricted point of view."[34]
Valve hiredErik Wolpaw andChet Faliszek to writePortal. Wolpaw felt that the constraints improved the game.[35] The concept of a computer AI guiding the player through experimental facilities to test the portal gun was arrived at early in the writing process.[15] They drafted early lines for a "polite" AI with humorous situations, such as requesting the player's character to "assume the party escort submission position", and found this style of approach to be well-suited to the game they wanted to create, leading to the creation of the GLaDOS character.[15] GLaDOS was central to the plot. Wolpaw said: "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."[36]
Wolpaw described the idea of using cake as the reward came about as "at the beginning of thePortal 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."[15][36] The cake element, along with additional messages given to the player in the behind-the-scenes areas, were written and drawn byKim Swift.[37]
The austere settings in the game came about because testers spent too much time trying to complete the puzzles using decorative but non-functional elements. As a result, the setting was minimized to make the usable aspects of the puzzle easier to spot, using the clinical feel of the setting in the filmThe Island as reference.[38] 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.[38] They also dropped the introduction of the Rat Man, a character who left the messages in the maintenance areas, to avoid creating too much narrative for the game,[39] though the character was developed further in a tie-in comic "Lab Rat", that tiesPortal andPortal 2's story together.[11][12] According to project lead Kim Swift, the final battle with GLaDOS went through many iterations, including having the player chased byJames 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, "Time pressure makes people think something is a lot more complicated than it really is", and Wolpaw admitted, "It was really cheap to make [the neurotoxin gas]" in order to simplify the dialogue during the battle.[31]
Chell's face and body are modeled afterAlésia Glidewell, an American freelance actress and voice-over artist, selected by Valve from a local modeling agency for her face and body structure.[30][40] Ellen McLain provided the voice of the antagonist GLaDOS. Erik Wolpaw noted, "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."[36]
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][36] Swift commented, "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."[38] Wolpaw further noted that the need to incinerate the Weighted Companion Cube came as a result of the final boss battle design; they recognized they had not introduced the idea of incineration necessary to complete the boss battle, and by training the player to do it with the Weighted Companion Cube, found the narrative "way stronger" with its "death".[41] Swift noted that any similarities to psychological situations in theMilgram experiment or2001: A Space Odyssey are entirely coincidental.[38]
The portal gun's full name, Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, can be abbreviated as ASHPD, which resembles a shortening of the name Adrian Shephard, the protagonist ofHalf-Life: Opposing Force. Fans noticed this similarity before the game's release; as a result, the team placed ared herring in the game by having the letters of Adrian Shephard highlighted on keyboards found within the game.[38] According to Kim Swift, the cake is a Black Forest cake that she thought looked the best at the nearbyRegent Bakery and Cafe inRedmond, Washington, and, as an Easter egg within the game, its recipe is scattered among various screens showing lines of binary code.[23][42] The Regent Bakery has stated that since the release of the game, its Black Forest cake has been one of its more popular items.[42]
Most of the soundtrack is non-lyricalambient music composed byKelly Bailey andMike Morasky, somewhat dark and mysterious to match the mood of the environments. The closing credits song, "Still Alive", was written byJonathan Coulton and sung by Ellen McLain (a classically trainedoperaticsoprano) as the GLaDOS character. A brief instrumental version of "Still Alive" is played in an uptempo Latin style over radios in-game. Wolpaw notes that Coulton was invited to Valve a year before the release ofPortal, though it was not yet clear where Coulton would contribute. "Once Kim [Swift] and I met with him, it quickly became apparent that he had the perfect sensibility to write a song for GLaDOS."[25][36] The use of the song over the closing credits was based on a similar concept from the gameGod Hand, one of Wolpaw's favorite titles.[43] The song was released as a free downloadable song for themusic video gameRock Band on April 1, 2008.[44][45][46] The soundtrack forPortal was released as a part ofThe Orange Box Original Soundtrack.[47]
The soundtrack was released in a four-disc retail bundle,Portal 2: Songs To Test By (Collector's Edition), on October 30, 2012, featuring music from both games.[48] The soundtrack was released via Steam Music on September 24, 2014.[49]
Portal was first released as part ofThe Orange Box forWindows andXbox 360 on October 10, 2007,[50][51] and for thePlayStation 3 on December 11, 2007.[52] In addition toPortal, theBox also includedHalf-Life 2 and its two add-on episodes, as well asTeam Fortress 2.Portal's inclusion within theBox was considered an experiment by Valve; having no idea of the success ofPortal, theBox provided it a "safety net" via means of these other games.Portal was kept to a modest length in case the game did not go over well with players.[24] The game was released as a standaloneretail product on April 9, 2008,[53] with the Windows version also available as a download through Steam.[1]
In January 2008, Valve released a special demo titledPortal: The First Slice, free to any Steam user usingNvidia graphics hardware, as part of a collaboration between the two companies.[54] The demo comes packaged withHalf-Life 2: Deathmatch,Peggle Extreme, andHalf-Life 2: Lost Coast. The demo includes test chambers 00 to 10 (eleven in total). Valve has since made the demo available to all Steam users.[55]
Portal is the first Valve-developed game to be added to the OS X-compatible list of games available on the launch of the Steam client for Mac on May 12, 2010,[56] supporting Steam Play, in which buying the game on Macintosh or Windows computer makes it playable on both. As part of the promotion,Portal was offered as a free game for any Steam user during the two weeks following the Mac client's launch.[57] Within the first week of this offer, over 1.5 million copies of the game were downloaded through Steam.[58] A similar promotion was held in September 2011, near the start of a traditional school year, encouraging the use of the game as an educational tool for science and mathematics.[59][60] Valve wrote that they felt thatPortal "makes physics, math, logic, spatial reasoning, probability, and problem-solving interesting, cool, and fun", a necessary feature to draw children into learning.[61] This was tied toDigital Promise, a United States Department of Education initiative to help develop new digital tools for education, and which Valve is part of.[62]
Portal: Still Alive was announced as an exclusiveXbox Live Arcade game at the 2008E3 convention, and was released on October 22, 2008.[63] It features the original game, 14 new challenges, and new achievements.[64] The additional content was based on levels from the map packPortal: The Flash Version created by We Create Stuff and contains no additional story-related levels.[65] According to Valvespokesman Doug Lombardi,Microsoft had previously rejectedPortal on the platform due to its large size.[66]Portal: Still Alive was well received by reviewers.[67]1UP.com's Andrew Hayward stated that, with the easier access and lower cost than paying forThe Orange Box,Portal is now "stronger than ever".[68]IGN editor Cam Shea ranked it fifth on his top 10 list of Xbox Live Arcade games. He stated that it was debatable whether an owner ofThe Orange Box should purchase this, as its added levels do not add to the plot. However, he praised the quality of the new maps included in the game.[69] The game ranked 7th in a later list of top Xbox Live Arcade titles compiled byIGN's staff in September 2010.[70] Additionally, Portal: Still Alive got ported to the Nintendo Switch as a part of The Companion Collection.
During the 2014GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia announced a port ofPortal to theNvidia Shield.[71] The port was released on May 12, 2014.[72] AlongsidePortal 2,Portal was released on theNintendo Switch on June 28, 2022, as part of thePortal: Companion Collection, developed by Valve and Nvidia Lightspeed Studios.[73][74]
Portal with RTX was announced by Nvidia during its GeForce Beyond event in September 2022. Aremaster of the original, the game is intended to demonstrate the functionality of theGeForce 40 series graphics cards withreal-time path tracing.[75] Initially planned for release in November 2022, it was ultimately released December 8, 2022, as a free DLC.[76]
| Aggregator | Score |
|---|---|
| Metacritic | PC: 90/100[77] X360 (Still Alive): 90/100[78] PC (RTX): 89/100[79] |
| Publication | Score |
|---|---|
| 1Up.com | A[17] |
| Eurogamer | 9/10[19] |
| GameSpot | 9.0/10 |
| GameSpy | 4.5/5.0[18] |
| IGN | 8.2/10[20] |
Portal received critical acclaim, often earning more praise than eitherHalf-Life 2: Episode Two orTeam Fortress 2, two titles also included inThe Orange Box. It was praised for its unique gameplay anddark,deadpan humor.[80]Eurogamer cited that "the way the game progresses from being a simple set of perfunctory tasks to a full-on part of theHalf-Life story is absolute genius",[81] whileGameSpy noted, "WhatPortal lacks in length, it more than makes up for in exhilaration."[82] The game was criticized for sparse environments, and both criticized and praised for its short length.[83] Aggregate reviews for the standalone PC version ofPortal gave the game a 90/100 through 28 reviews onMetacritic.[77] In 2011, Valve stated thatPortal had sold more than four million copies through the retail versions, including the standalone game andThe Orange Box, and from the Xbox Live Arcade version.[84]
The game generated a fan following for the Weighted Companion Cube[85]—even though the cube itself does not talk or act in the game. Fans have createdplush[86] andpapercraft versions of the cube and the various turrets,[87] as well as PCcase mods[88] and models of the Portal cake and portal gun.[89][90][91] Jeep Barnett, a programmer forPortal, noted that players have told Valve that they had found it more emotional to incinerate the Weighted Companion Cube than to harm one of the "Little Sisters" fromBioShock.[38] Both GLaDOS and the Weighted Companion Cube were nominated for the Best New Character Award on G4, with GLaDOS winning the award for "having lines that will be quoted by gamers for years to come."[92][93][94]Ben Croshaw ofZero Punctuation praised the game as "absolutely sublime from start to finish ... I went in expecting a slew of interesting portal-based puzzles and that's exactly what I got, but what I wasn't expecting was some of the funniest pitch black humor I've ever heard in a game". He felt the short length was ideal as it did not outstay its welcome.[95]
Writing forGameSetWatch in 2009, columnist Daniel Johnson pointed out similarities betweenPortal andErving Goffman's essay ondramaturgy,The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which equates one's persona to the front and backstage areas of a theater.[96] The game was also made part of the required course material among other classical and contemporary works, including Goffman's work, for a freshman course "devoted to engaging students with fundamental questions of humanity from multiple perspectives and fostering a sense of community" forWabash College in 2010.[97][98]Portal has also been cited as a strong example ofinstructional scaffolding that can be adapted for more academic learning situations, as the player, through careful design of levels by Valve, is first hand-held in solving simple puzzles with many hints at the correct solution, but this support is slowly removed as the player progresses in the game, and completely removed when the player reaches the second half of the game.[99]Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Hamish Todd consideredPortal as an exemplary means of game design by demonstrating a series of chambers after the player has obtained the portal gun that gently introduce the concept of flinging without any explicit instructions.[100]Portal was exhibited at the Smithsonian Art Exhibition in America from February 14 through September 30, 2012.Portal won the "Action" section for the platform "Modern Windows".[101]
Since its release,Portal is still considered one of thebest video games of all time, having been included on several cumulative "Top Games of All Time" lists through 2018.[102][103][104]
Portal won several awards:
The popularity of the game and its characters led Valve to develop merchandise forPortal made available through its onlineValve physical merchandise store. Some of the more popular items were the Weighted Companion Cube plush toys andfuzzy dice.[133] When first released, both were sold out in under 24 hours.[134] Other products available through the Valve store include T-shirts and Aperture Science coffee mugs and parking stickers, and merchandise relating to the phrase "the cake is a lie", which has become aninternet meme. Wolpaw noted they did not expect certain elements of the game to be as popular as they were, while other elements they had expected to become fads were ignored, such as a giant hoop that rolls on-screen during the final scene of the game that the team had named Hoopy.[15][135]
Swift stated that futurePortal developments would depend on the community's reactions, saying, "We're still playing it by ear at this point, figuring out if we want to do multiplayer next, orPortal 2, or release map packs."[9] Some rumors regarding a sequel arose due to casting calls for voice actors.[136][137] On March 10, 2010,Portal 2 was officially announced for a release late in that year;[138] the announcement was preceded by analternate reality game based on unexpected patches made toPortal that contained cryptic messages in relation toPortal 2's announcement, including an update to the game, creating a different ending for the fate of Chell. The original game left her in a deserted parking lot after destroying GLaDOS, but the update involved Chell being dragged back into the facility by a "Party Escort Bot". ThoughPortal 2 was originally announced for a Q4 2010 release, the game was released on April 19, 2011.[22][139][140][141]
Amodding community has developed aroundPortal, with users creating their own test chambers and other in-game modifications.[142][143] The group "We Create Stuff" created anAdobe Flash version ofPortal, titledPortal: The Flash Version, just before release ofThe Orange Box. This flash version was well received by the community[144] and the group has since converted it to a map pack for the published game.[145] Another mod,Portal: Prelude, is an unofficial prequel developed by an independent team of three that focuses on the pre-GLaDOS era of Aperture Science, and contains nineteen additional "crafty and challenging" test chambers.[146][147] AnASCII version ofPortal was created by Joe Larson.[148][149] An unofficial port ofPortal to theiPhone using theUnity game engine was created but only consisted of a single room from the game.[150][151]Mari0 is a fan-made four-player coop mashup of the originalSuper Mario Bros. andPortal.[152]
An unofficial port for theNintendo 64 console titledPortal 64 was under development.[c] By September 2023, the programmer had a working copy but still had ways to go to be completely finished.[160] The project was taken down in January 2024 due to a request by Valve; according to the main developer, the port's reliance on "Nintendo's proprietary libraries" was the reason.[161][162]
A film adaptation has been indevelopment hell since 2013, and it was reported on May 25, 2021, that the project is still in development byJ.J. Abrams andBad Robot and the script has been written.[163] As of 2022, J.J. Abrams continued to express interest in bringingPortal to film.[164]
{{cite web}}:|archive-url= is malformed: timestamp (help)In other Steam news, Portal: First Slice – the official demo for the title named Game of the Year by over 30 publications – is now available for free to all gamers via Steam.
{{cite web}}:|archive-url= is malformed: timestamp (help)CS1 maint: url-status (link)
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