Portal retrospective [PC/360/PS3]

The concept behind Portal began life as a final year project at the game design university Digipen called Narbacular Drop, put together by seven hard-working students under the name Nuclear Monkey Software. The game was spotted by Valve reps attending the university’s annual recruitment fair, after which the team were invited to meet with Valve co-founder Gabe Newell. Just 15 minutes into their presentation, Gabe asked the entire team if they wanted a job.
What the team managed to create during their subsequent time at Valve was in many ways a spiritual successor to Narbacular Drop. Portal employed the technology developed for that title and, with a narrative penned by Valve’s acclaimed writing duo of Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, laid heavy hints the new game was actually taking place in the Half-Life universe.

See, the chambers start out simply enough...

As a experimental subject (known only as Chell) for the mysterious Aperture Science corporation, you wake from stasis only to realise something’s gone very, very wrong. Aperture’s AI, the sinister GlaDOS, wants to put you through a strict testing regimen involving the company’s latest piece of kit but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else around, and said tests don’t seem to have your best interests at heart, to put it mildly. It soon becomes apparent as you make your way through the game that GLaDOS might, in all honesty, be barking mad. What on earth’s happened?
Portal’s big draw was the gadget you haul through level after level, the handheld portal device. If for some reason you’ve never seen the game running, think of portals as two separate sides of the same doorway. Fire the gun once, drop an orange portal – one side of the doorway. Fire the gun at something else, drop a blue portal – the other side.  These two could be far, far apart or the first could be on the ceiling, the second on the floor – either way, you stepped into one, and instantly came out of the other.
You had to overcome a score of self-contained puzzles, or test chambers, using this deceptively simple trick in steadily more mind-bending ways, often putting portals down in one place then switching them somewhere else multiple times to reach your goal.

...but then the puzzles got steadily tougher...

Tricks like this were a brilliant tech demo, not to mention a superb example of emergent design that would have been enough for many small developers to retire on. But again, it was Wolpaw and Faliszek’s writing that took Portal from a party piece to an absolute undisputed classic.
Portal can feel like something of a departure from traditional storytelling, but the team still demonstrate more of an ability to develop characters and build up a world than many novelists ever manage. Much of this was down to GLaDOS, surely one of the most well-realised villains in any medium, let alone games. Voiced by frequent Valve collaborator Ellen McLain, the malevolvent AI both paints a picture of why you’re here – what happened to Aperture Science – and adds a sense of urgency to the experience of play. For all of you who beat Portal, how far would you honestly have got without GLaDOS and her constant promises of cake at the end of the journey?
And she wasn’t solely mad, either. The slow realisation that builds over the course of the game is not just of how crazy GLaDOS has gone, but also how lonely she must be. Murderous and psychotic, sure, but still lonely. Ellen McLain’s superb performance under the FX on her voice, and the transition from stony artificial intelligence to – gasp – a rounded personality is, once again, a masterstroke. The constant (yet beautifully paced) stream of blackly funny quips are what many people remember most fondly of Portal – “Assume the party escort submission position” being one of my favourites.

...and then things start trying to kill you.

And yet! You could argue it wasn’t GLaDOS who stole the show. No, it was something so affecting it moved grown men – manly types with tool belts and hacksaws – to wipe their eyes and complain about all the dust in the air. So… a puppy, or adorable fluffy kitten, perhaps? No. It was a cube.
Now stop – stop. Seriously, don’t even go there if you’re about to tell me the cube meant nothing to you. All I can say to that is you’re most likely dead inside. Admittedly, the first sight of the Companion Cube was innocuous enough. GLaDOS presents you with it, saying you have to carry the thing through the next level. No big deal. Happens in loads of games, right? Ah, but wait… this cube has little pink hearts on it. Apparently beta testers were dumping the cube (originally blank) at the start of the level, and Valve wanted a way to make sure people remembered they had a silent little friend they were supposed to be helping through this particular puzzle. Kim Swift from the Portal team talked in interviews about how the cube’s new look was inspired by government research into deprived subjects creating attachments to inanimate objects: an appropriately creepy inspiration given how GlaDOS is constantly manipulating you.
That said, the moment at the end of that level when you have to face the inevitable is heart-wrenching. GLaDOS, clearly as mad as a sack full of badgers by this point, informs you regretfully your Companion Cube must be “euthanised” in an “emergency intelligence incinerator.” Well, it floored me. I literally stopped for five minutes, appalled that I had to destroy my only friend.

Aperture Science is definitely not a happy place. Or a sane one, looks like.

It was the way these things came together – like the genius of GLaDOS, the sparkling, jet-black humour in the dialogue, the unexpected attachment to an inanimate cube and, yes, that ending song (Jonathan Coulton’s superb Still Alive) – that made Portal more than just an eye-catching concept. However innovative the mechanics, a blank physics playground would surely have never stood up over a longer period. Ditto GlaDOS and Aperture Science; without portals and the structure of a science lab, they wouldn’t have stood out half so much.
Sure, there were plenty of negative reactions to it not taking very long to finish, but as Erik Wolpaw notes himself, “without the constraints, Portal would not be as good a game.” It’s hard to disagree, not least when the end result is heaven on a DVD-ROM. Those two, three hours delivered more inventiveness and emotion than a dozen blockbusters stuck together.
And yet now Portal 2′s about to be released, and it’s looking as if Valve have done even better with the idea the second time around. I can hardly wait for it to arrive. We’re going to have fun… with science