From Black Mesa to the Orange Box

Finding Portal’s setting turned out to be the easy part. The Portal team knew they wanted their game to feel different than any of Valve’s other titles. They wanted to find a unique voice for their game; something that definitively set it apart from Half-Life. “At the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what school of philosophy our game would be based on,” explains Wolpaw. “That was followed by about fifteen minutes of silence, and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.” Cake would be the answer; the team just didn’t know it yet.

Narbacular Drop was a whimsical game about a princess who used magic to escape from a demon’s mountain prison. It was amusing in its own way – the heroine’s name was Princess No-Knees, because she couldn’t jump. However Narbacular Drop’s whimsy was far from the more refined wit that Portal utilized. Another problem with Narbacular Drop is that it was only about fifteen minutes long; Valve would need to create a longer, more involved story that still centered on portal technology, but also tied into the Half-Life universe. It’s no surprise the solution didn’t come right away.

Wolpaw sat down and began drafting ideas for how to develop the team’s unique student project into a game that people might actually pay money to play. “We kind of had a complete game experience when we walked into it,” recalls Wolpaw. “So we were trying to find a way to, as a nondestructively as possible, develop the setting and figure out the narrative.” Wolpaw envisioned an advanced AI that was guiding players through a series of obstacle courses in an effort to test an experimental new portal gun device. “Humor was in our wheelhouse,” says Wolpaw. “And we kind of figured that's what Valve was hiring us for. We didn't think they were hiring us to write drama…so we just kept going with it, and we started play testing it, and it quickly became evident that this was the right direction to go.”

The first scene Wolpaw wrote was a sequence that actually takes place late in the game. As protagonist Chell approaches the end of the final test chamber, a polite AI program asks her to place the portal gun on the ground and assume the party escort submission position. The rest of the team loved the ideas presented in Wolpaw’s early draft. It was clear that these kinds of antics, and the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System (GLaDOS), in particular, were a perfect fit for Valve’s new game. Portal had found its voice.