Alternate Reality Game puzzle design - Adam Foster of Valve talks about the design of the Portal 2 ARG, (previously)  and do's and don'ts for future ARGs.
posted by Artw on Jun 18, 2013 - 10 comments

Wayside Creations: the studio that produced the surprisingly high-budget fallout Fan series: Nuka Break (with Dougie Jones!) (previously, previously) have turned their attention to the office politics of our favorite hive of mad science: Aperture R&D.
posted by The Whelk on Mar 18, 2013 - 15 comments

Teach With Portals. Last summer, a New York Times review of Portal 2 made the following prediction: "Somewhere out there an innovative, dynamic high school physics teacher will use Portal 2 as the linchpin of an entire series of lessons and will immediately become the most important science teacher those lucky students have ever had." With Teach With Portals, Valve's new education initiative, this just might be possible. [more inside]
posted by grabbingsand on Jun 21, 2012 - 45 comments

With a little bit of help from Aperture Laboratories, these guys created a real Portal gun.
posted by disillusioned on Jun 12, 2012 - 41 comments

25 extra minutes of Cave Johnson - taken Portal 2's Perpetual Testing Initiative DLC.
posted by Artw on May 11, 2012 - 33 comments

No GLaDOS. No Chell. No portals. Set in the 1980s. Competitive multiplayer. Multiple endings. The Portal 2 That Could Have Been.
posted by Artw on Mar 9, 2012 - 44 comments

Mari0 is a Super Mario Bros and Portal mashup currently under development. Previously, the same developer made Not Tetris; a faithful reimagining of the original game, but with the addition of realistic physics and geometry.
posted by schmod on Sep 1, 2011 - 21 comments

Portal 2 has finally hit the streets, and despite a somewhat rocky start with their controversial promotional ARG (previously), it looks to be a huge success. Interestingly for such a critically-acclaimed blockbuster, the title's core ideas steam from a pair of concept projects from student design school DigiPen: the original portal system from Narbacular Drop (video - download - previously) and the sequel's physics-altering gels from Tag: The Power of Paint (video - download - previously - previouslier). Combine these innovative ideas with some Lost-meets-Life After People level design, excellent voice acting, and top-notch writing, and it's easy to see why so many people called in sick this past week. But playing the game is just the beginning -- look inside for a collection of easter eggs, story theories, videos, and other goodies from the post-mortem. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Apr 21, 2011 - 425 comments

You say potato, Valve say... potato.

Just over a year after the Portal 2 announcement ARG (previously) had people dialing up a mysterious BBS, on April 1st Valve pushed out updates to thirteen indie games through Steam, under the tag #potatofoolsday. Some of the games got a little starchy straight away, but more interesting was the appearance of cryptic glyphs, which seemed to link to other games in the set, and nonsense phrases. Alongside a cheeky coded shoutout to members of the Facepunch forums, a hidden frame in the latest Aperture Science Investment Opportunity video (1, 2, 3) appeared to confirm there are 16 glyph-and-letter sets, and 13 phrases to be found in and around the games. But what to do with them even when the set's complete? And what of the uplifted talking raccoon and the blogger whose boss's brother has been kidnapped by sentient potatoes? [more inside]
posted by emmtee on Apr 6, 2011 - 115 comments

Steam, the hugely popular online videogame distribution network, is now available for the Mac. MeFi favorite Portal is also free via the service (both Mac and PC) until the 24th. (previously)
posted by mkultra on May 12, 2010 - 246 comments

Hang on: Steam is coming to Macs. Christ. [more inside]
posted by hnnrs on Mar 3, 2010 - 114 comments

On Monday, Valve software issued a small patch for Portal. A New achievement ("Transmission Received") for the game was unlocked if 26 radios in the game were carried to the end of the levels. Each radio had it's own sound file, and concealed in those sound files were Morse code, pictures, and an md5 hash string containing a phone number which, if called via modem, has an interesting login (from Gladios 3.11) and seems to be streaming some strange ascii art.
posted by Catblack on Mar 2, 2010 - 130 comments

Do you miss blasting with your orange and blue space-warping cannons? Surely you miss Companion Cube... Nine months of work by a dedicated modder: NykO18 (and team) has crystallized into what amounts to an epic prequel to Portal, called Portal: Prelude, whose story arc focuses on the "pre-GlaDOS epoch". It's said to have more gameplay than even the original: 8 chapters, 48 challenges, 6 advanced maps and more than 400 lines of speech. [more inside]
posted by tybeet on Oct 21, 2008 - 58 comments

Portal's "Still Alive." The man who wrote it. The woman who sang it. The official skinny, with lyrics and chords. A music video parody. On piano, guitar, and Garry's Mod. Its place in video game history. And finally, one or two ways to get it. (Spoilers all.)
posted by Soup on Nov 6, 2007 - 121 comments

Welcome to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. Remember our motto: "There's a hole in the sky, through which things can fly." (Coming soon.)
posted by nervestaple on Jul 20, 2006 - 26 comments