The Cake is a Lie

Ok, allow me to get a bit nerdy here for as minute. I'm not a big gamer, but I'm a huge fan of any game that Valve releases, especially anything related to Half-Life. So this was a great week for me since they released The Orange Box - a collection of games consisting of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal.

Portal, by far, was the biggest surprise in that it turned what was essentially a technology proof-of-concept for the Portal Gun (shoot a projectile into a point A and a point B and you can walk from A to B seamlessly) into one of the most heart-warmingly funny, albeit the humour was rather dark, gaming finales I ever saw.

The short (3-4 hour long) game finished off with possibly the greatest credit-roll sequence ever created, as GLaDOS (an AI villain of the game) sweetly recollects what happened in the past few hours in a rousing song which I included bellow. Spoilers be damned.

My favourite part of the whole thing is the story about how Valve took advantage of the gaming/web community in creating Portal.

The core "Portal" idea: Valve's Gabe Newell saw a student project Narbacular Drop from DigiPen Institute of Technology which features movable "portals". Gabe hired that whole team on the spot and brought them into Valve to work on the project.

The GLaDOS dialogue: The script for the hilariously sinister voice that guides you through the game with promises of a "warm, moist cake" was written by the staff of a legendary satirical game-humour site Old Man Murray who are now working for Valve. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that they are also running a web community site called Portal of Evil :)

The Finale Song: This clever tune was written by another famous nerd, song-writer Jonathan Coulton, who some of you may know from a song Code Monkey. He also accompanied one of my favourite authors - John Hodgman - on the book tour for The Areas of My Expertise.

And now that the end of "Half-Life 2: Episode 2" ties in nicely with the going-ons of the Portal story line, I can only hope that the Portal technology will come into play when the Episode 3 rolls around.