GameTavern - Portal

What a crazy freaking game. It was a blast to play. The computer, GLaDOS was so entertaining.

anyone else play/beat it???????????????????

The song at the end of the game is the greatest time watching credits I've had by far. Its sung by the computer, oh and in the game GLaDOS promises you cake, for all you non portal players

Theres been so much speculation over this 4 hour game. I found some stuff on PA about Aperture Science.

*spoilerish*

Quote:

"1953 - Aperture Science begins operations as a manufacturer of shower curtains. Early product line provides a very low-tech portal between the inside and outside of your shower. Very little science is actually involved. The name is chosen to make the curtains appear more hygienic.

1956 - Eisenhower administration awards Aperture a contract to provide shower curtains to all branches of the military except the Navy.

1957 - 1975 - Mostly shower curtains.

1978 - Aperture Founder and CEO, Cave Johnson, is exposed to mercury while secretly developing a dangerous mercury-injected rubber sheeting from which he plans to manufacture seven deadly shower curtains to be given as gifts to each member of the House Naval Appropriations committee.

1979 - Both of Cave Johnson's kidneys fail. Brain damaged, dying, and incapable of being convinced that time is not now flowing backwards, Johnson lays out a three tiered R&D program. The results, he says, will 'guarantee the continued success of Aperture Science into the fast-approaching distant past.'

Tier 1: The Heimlich Counter-Maneuver - A reliable technique for interrupting the life-saving Heimlich Maneuver.

Tier 2: The Take-A-Wish Foundation - A charitable organization that will purchase wishes from the parents of terminally ill children and redistribute them to wish-deprived but otherwise healthy adults.

Tier 3: 'Some kind of rip in the fabric of space... That would... Well, it'd be like, I don't know, something that would help with the shower curtains I guess. I haven't worked this idea out as much as the wish-taking one.'

1981 - Diligent Aperture engineers compelte the Heimlich Counter-Maneuver and Take-A-Wish Foundation initiatives. The company announces products related to the research in a lavish, televised ceremony. These products become immediately wildly unpopular. After a string of very public choking and despondent sick child disasters, senior company officials are summoned before a Senate investigative committee. During these proceedings, an engineer mentions that some progress has been made on Tier 3, the 'man-sized ad hoc quantum tunnel through physical space with possible applications as a shower curtain.' The committee is quickly permanently recessed, and Aperture is granted an open-ended contract to secretly research on the 'Portal' and Heimlich Counter-Maneuver projects.

1981-1985 - Work progresses on the 'Portal' project. Several high ranking Fatah personnel choke to death on lamb chunks despite the intervention of their bodyguards.

1986 - Word reaches Aperture management that another defense contractor called Black Mesa is working on a similar portal technology. In response to this news, Aperture begins developing the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System (GLaDOS), an artificially intelligent research assitant and disk operating system.

1996 - After a decade spent bringing the disk operating parts of GLaDOS to a state of more or less basic functionality, work begins on the Genetic Lifeform component.

Several Years Later - The untested AI is activated for the first time as one of the planned activities on Aperture's first annual bring-your-daughter-to-work day.

In many ways, the initial test goes well..."

Basically many years before HL2/Portal, GLaDOS locks down the facility on the first annual "bring-your-daughter-to-work day" and takes over the security system. She then kills everyone in the facility with the neurotoxin but a few guys tossed together the morality core and plugged it in. Either GLaDOS or the scientists put all the children into stasis/"relaxation chamber" but since the building is still full of neurotoxin the scientists still die. GLaDOS continues being batshit crazy and works on the Portal project herself, thawing out test subjects as she needs them. Meanwhile outside .the events of Half-Life 1-2 fuck up the world making no one ever come check up on GLaDOS or the Aperture Science facility.

So fast forward to present time and GLaDOS completes work on the portal gun and insert the events of Portal after a few test subjects get dead