Portal 2

[Helios]

Might as well give this a proper topic here.

Yesterday, March 1, 2010, was an ordinary day. Then an update to Portal was launched. And suddenly, it wasn't an ordinary day at all.

The new patch places 26 radios hidden throughout the game. Your goal is to find them and bring them to a certain part of the map, at which point they will play a transmission. Some are Morse Code, but the majority are encoded Slow-Scan TV images. http://i49.tinypic.com/s4b7zn.jpg%5D

These images lead to a BBS telnet line that seems to be powered by some sort of a backup to GLaDOS, and upon connecting to it with the proper login info, some mysterious ASCII art was displayed: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2801/440 ... d393_o.jpg

The SSTV images are pretty abstract, although they all seem to point at some sort of an Aperture Science project, possibly the Borealis. The ASCII art is a little more direct, with some pictures clearly showing the Portal Turrets, Dog or a similar android, and GLaDOS herself.

So what is all this? Well the Portal community has been cracking at this for over 24 hours now, and no one still knows what it all is. The leading theory is that it's a viral campaign promoting a new Valve project, the most likely suspects being Portal 2 and the long-awaited Half Life 2 Episode Three. There's expected to be an announcement on what is going on here during the Game Developers Conference next week.

So is GLaDOS indeed "Still Alive" and Portal 2 coming? Episode Three? Orange Box 2? Stay tuned...

[Helios]

Morse Code messages were decoded, they are as follows:

1: interior transmission active external data line active message digest active

5: 9e107d9d372bb6821bd91d3542a419d6

12: system data dump active user backup active password backup active

17: beep beeeep beep beep beeeep beeeep beeeep beep beeeep beep beep (which is literally Morse for "LOL")

[SilverWolf]

[Jinx]

lol, you were on that fast Silver. While the steam forum post went by blazing fast (Currently has 5000+ replies of this posting), I saw a blog post that had credited you with the findings: http://netshroud.wordpress.com/2010/03/ ... on-update/

[SilverWolf]

[Arcalane]

[Jinx]

WARNING: Spoilers in my post if you haven't played Portal / HL2 and onward

An interesting idea that has popped up on the steam forums is that what if Aperture Science was also doing research on time travel technology (Maybe accidentally while competing with Black Mesa in creating portal technology? Remember when taking the teleportation device back to Kleiner's lab near the end of Nova Prospekt? You arrived there a week later) Maybe this could explain the mysterious disappearance of the Borealis and also the recent update to the ending of Portal. With the main voice of destroying the Borealis gone (Eli), Kleiner and others tempted by the technology find the vessel and accidentally revive a backup copy of GlaDOS who knowing you will defeat her, sends an android back in time to retrieve their valuable asset for whatever reason. So was the ending changed because Valve is just adding more to the story for later... or was it changed because the time line was altered and we just saw its affects? Conspiracies abound!

[Arcalane]

[Jinx]

Entirely; I'm not saying that the Combine teleporter was supposed to do that or that anybody in the Black Mesa side of the HL universe even knew these time disruptions could occur, but that Aperture Science noticed these abnormalities with their own technologies and then just further experimented with them

[Helios]