The player is introduced to Aperture in Portal, which is said by Valve to be set sometime between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2. From center top clockwise: Chell, GLaDOS, P-Body (left) and Atlas, the turrets, Cave Johnson (in picture frame), a Companion Cube, and Wheatley GLaDOS remains driven to test human subjects despite the lack of humans.Ī promotional poster created by Valve artist Tristan Reidford, showcasing the characters from Portal. In trying to find a way to defeat GLaDOS, he finds that Chell, one of the human subjects kept in cryogenic storage within Aperture, has a high level of tenacity, and arranges for the events of Portal to occur by moving her to the top of GLaDOS' testing list. In the games and the comic Lab Rat, one employee Doug Rattmann survived due to his schizophrenia and distrust of GLaDOS. Despite this, on the day she was officially activated (coincidentally on " Take Your Daughter to Work Day"), she turned against the researchers and killed nearly everyone in the facility with lethal doses of neurotoxin gas. The Aperture researchers constructed a number of "personality cores" that would fit onto GLaDOS to prevent her from turning against them. GLaDOS was built to control the facility and monitor the tests, but researchers found that the computer had villainous tendencies, threatening to kill the entire staff before it was shut down in time. Sometime after Johnson's death, the old sections of the facility were vitrified, and a more modern facility built atop those ruins. Near the point of his death, Johnson ordered his lifelong assistant Caroline (voiced by Ellen McLain) to be the first test subject for a mind-to-computer transfer her personality would ultimately form the core of GLaDOS (also McLain). In Portal 2, the player explores these long-abandoned areas of Aperture, learning that the company had moved from testing on the country's finest, to paid volunteers, and ultimately to forcing its own employees to participate in testing. During this time, Johnson became poisoned from exposure to moon dust, a key component of the paint needed for the portal technology, and became increasingly deranged. Johnson acquired the rights to a disused salt mine in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where they started building a labyrinthine set of offices, laboratories, facilities, and test chambers.
Its research happened upon the discovery of portal technology, and soon became a direct competitor with Black Mesa Research Facility (from the Half-Life series) for government funding. Simmons) and originally sought to make shower curtains for the military. Aperture Science was founded by Cave Johnson (voiced by J.K. A number of spin-off media have been developed alongside the games, and several of the game elements have become parts of Internet memes.īoth Portal games take place in the fictional "Aperture Science Enrichment Center". In addition to the challenging puzzle elements, both games are praised for their dark humor, written by Erik Wolpaw, Chet Faliszek, and Jay Pinkerton, voice work by actors Ellen McLain, Stephen Merchant, and J.K. Its success led to the creation of the much longer Portal 2, which included both single player and cooperative player modes it too received near-universal critical acclaim. The first game was released as part of a five-game compilation, The Orange Box, and though intended as a short bonus feature of the compilation, was instead considered the highlight of the five. Another game, Tag: The Power of Paint, formed the basis of surface-altering "gels" introduced in Portal 2.īoth games have received near-universal praise, and have sold millions of copies. The portal concept was introduced by the game Narbacular Drop and led to the basis for the first game.
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The Portal games are noted for bringing students and their projects from the DigiPen Institute of Technology into Valve and extending their ideas into the full games. A number of other mechanics, such as lasers, light bridges, tractor funnels and turrets, exist to aid or hinder the player's goal to reach the exit. This allows complex "flinging" maneuvers to be used to cross wide gaps or perform other feats to reach the exit for each test chamber. The player-character or objects in the game world may move through portals while conserving their momentum. Most of the tests involve using the "Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device" – the "portal gun" – that creates a human-sized wormhole-like connection between two flat surfaces.
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Set in the Half-Life universe, the two main games in the series, Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011), center on a woman, Chell, forced to undergo a series of tests within the Aperture Science Enrichment Center by a malicious artificial intelligence, GLaDOS, that controls the facility. Portal is a series of first-person puzzle-platform video games developed by Valve.
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