Case Study: Portal, David Evangelista

Portal is a decently known game made in the year 2007.  It was made by the company known as Valve, who released the game as well as several others in a package known as “the Orange Box.”  After lots of sales, the game, portal, was able to get its stand alone game on steam in the year 2008, before getting one available for download on the 360.  The game is mainly known for the meme it has given birth to:  “The cake is a lie.”   Portal is a first person shooter with puzzle elements.  For a shooter, the only people that end up dying are robots and the player herself.  The player ends up following the story of a female silent protagonists that people call “Chell” based on that being what her file name is in the games directory.   What the player has to do is shoot portals at walls with a portal gun and using it to solve various puzzles that the game presents the player with.  The game’s simple idea was enough to make many sales, before getting its sequel, Portal  2 which was released March 10 2010.

The game itself is the successor of a freeware independent game made in the year 2005, Narbacular Drop.  A member of valve, Robin Walker, saw this game during one of DigiPen’s annual conventions before contacting his team to help improve the idea.  After showing the game’s design to Valve’s president, Gabe Newell, he quickly was impressed and funded the game for it to be further developed into what we know is Portal, the original team of the idea now being part of Valve.   To make the game even easier to make, the new Portal team worked side by side with the half-life team, incorporating Portal’s story with the half-life series as well as being able to use objects already existing in half-life to save time in making designs.

In the beginning of Portal, the player finds himself waking up in a strange room.  She is then shortly told by a robotic voice from the sky that she is about to take several tests, for reasons that are never disclosed.  That is all that the player is told, making the player feel as if he or she has no idea what is going on.  As the player progresses through the game, the player obtains the Apperture Science Handheld Portal Device (ASHPD) which most players just call the portal gun.  The concept is simple, the player shoots portals at walls which are connected.  If you go into the blue portal, you exit out of the orange portal.  If you enter the orange portal, you exit out of the blue portal.  According to the robotic voice, GLaDoS, at the end of these experiments, the player will receive the ultimate prize:  cake.

Other then the simple concept, the game also has a pretty advanced physics engine.   All items, especially the player, is effected by gravity.  The developers made it a fact that the only reason the player doesn’t die from gravity is because of the super boots their avatar wears to avoid fall damage.   What further increases the physics engine is that the acceleration of an item that enters the portal leaves the portal with the same amount of acceleration.  So if an item is dropped from a high place into a blue portal, it’ll leave the portal at around the same speed.  This allows the player to do super jumps by mimicking the same thing as dropping an item, just with the players avatar instead.  The problem with this was that players would normally be able to make their avatar, Chell, move incredibly fast by simply shooting a portal at the ground and at the ceiling.  To avoid this, when something enters a portal, the object that enters it actually loses a little tiny bit of momentum each time they go through the portal.  Either way, although they do slow down a bit, it is not signifigant enough to stop the player from flying from one side of the map to another.   “In lay man’s terms, speedy thing goes in, speedy thing goes out.”

The game portal was incredibly sold amazingly well for a first person shooter puzzle platform game.  It’s widely known for the meme it had given birth to as mentioned earlier:  “The cake is a lie.”  This meme actually was later used as a reference BioWare’s game, Dragon Age: Origins, where at the end of the game, Sten says:  “Where’s the cake?  I was told there’d be cake.  The cake is a lie!”   Besides it’s meme, it’s also known for one of the games that teachers sign up for.  Valve now gives free copies of portal to teachers for them to teach their students with.   Teachers are finding ways to incorporate the game Portal into their lessons to teach students about physics, allowing them to enjoy the game and have fun in a learning environment.   How a video game where the player is forced to do puzzles while under the pressure of psycho killer robots trying to put bullets into their avatar is beyond me.  However, if kids are able to learn from a game like portal, I can’t help but be both amazed as this proves that kids can learn something from a video game.

Portal is an incredibly fun and interesting game, putting the players mind to the test to solve the puzzles thrown his or her way.  Many people, including myself, enjoyed playing the game and do not regret buying it.   May a portal game 3 eventually come out some how.