Portal

Portal is a first-person shooter puzzle video game made by Valve Corporation set inside the Half-Life series. It is available for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac and PC.

Plot

The game starts with Chell waking up in a small glass room that has only a bed, a toilet, and a radio inside. She is told by GLaDOS that testing will start soon, and an orange portal opens on one of the walls. Once the player goes through, she enters the testing rooms and begins testing. There are 19 testing rooms, called Test Chambers, in all.

The tests start out simple. Chell has to pick up boxes, called Weighted Storage Cubes, and put them on buttons, which will open the door to the exit of the chamber. At this point, GLaDOS speaks to Chell as a guide, praises her, and promises her cake when the tests are over. Near the beginning of the game, Chell gets the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, also known as the Portal Gun. At first, her Portal Gun only makes blue portals and the orange portals are made by GLaDOS. Later, Chell gets the complete Portal Gun and can make both blue and orange portals.

The tests become more and more dangerous farther into the game. In some rooms, there is deadly acid on the floor. In others, there are balls of electricity called High Energy Pellets which will kill Chell if she touches them. During these tests, GLaDOS becomes more and more sarcastic, giving Chell useless advice, such as "The floor here will kill you. Try to avoid it." At one point, GLaDOS tells Chell a chamber is broken and she must go through a chamber full of sentry guns, called Turrets, instead. If a Turret sees Chell, it will shoot at her until she dies. In this chamber is a hidden room. In the hidden room are drawings and writing on the walls left by an unknown person. The writing says things like "the cake is a lie" and "she's always watching" with a picture of a camera. There are more rooms like this in later chambers.

In another chamber, Chell has to use the Weighted Companion Cube, which looks like a Weighted Storage Cube with hearts on it, to solve the test. During the test, GLaDOS tells Chell several times that the Companion Cube is not alive, but at the end of the test, she tells Chell she has to "kill" the Companion Cube to get to the next test.

After killing GLaDOS and escaping Aperture Science Laboratories, Chell, the protagonist of Portal, is taken back to the labs and placed in suspended animation for many years. While she sleeps, the laboratories become more and more run down, because no one is there to take care of them. Once she wakes up, a small, dim-witted robot named Wheatley tries to help her escape the building. In the process, he accidentally reactivates GLaDOS, who, still angry with Chell for killing her, forces Chell to perform tests similar to the ones she performed in Portal.

While Chell solves the puzzles and GLaDOS repairs the building, Wheatley works behind the scenes to free Chell. Once he does, they try to sabotage GLaDOS's weapons, including her turrets and neurotoxin. In a confrontation with GLaDOS, Chell presses a button that removes GLaDOS from controlling the laboratory and puts Wheatley in her place. In anger, GLaDOS reveals that Wheatley is an intelligence-dampening sphere, created by scientists to distract GLaDOS from evil by distracting her with a constant stream of stupid ideas. Wheatley is outraged and becomes power-mad. He puts GLaDOS's AI into a potato and turns on Chell, sending them both deep underground to an abandoned part of the facility.

Underground is the first Aperture Science Laboratories, started in the 1950s. While exploring the area, recorded messages by Aperture Science founder Cave Johnson and his secretary Caroline tell the history of the company and explain the many dangerous tests performed there. As Chell moves further up in the labs, time moves forward as well, into the 1970s. Cave reveals that the company is bankrupt and must use homeless people as test subjects rather than the astronauts and Olympic athletes they had used before. Here Chell reunites with GLaDOS, whom she places on her portal gun and carries with her.

As they move forward, GLaDOS begins to repeat things that Caroline says and becomes confused. When they move into part of the lab that was used during the 1980s, a message from Cave says he has gotten cancer from working with moon dust and he is dying. After a rant about the unfairness of life, he says that he wants Caroline to run the company after he dies. GLaDOS comes up with a plan to destroy Wheatley once they find him.

Characters

• Chell is the player-character in both Portal games. She is a silent protagonist outside of small grunts during physical tasks. Very little truthful information is known about Chell; while GLaDOS makes many statements to Chell's background and history, GLaDOS herself admits she is unreliable.

• Cave Johnson was the founder and CEO of the fictional company Aperture Science. He is mentioned in some of the alternative reality game information associated with Portal in describing the history of the company, while his presence in Portal 2 is through pre-recorded messages (voiced by J.K. Simmons) played while the player-character explores the depths of Aperture Science. Based on in-game information, Johnson is shown to have grown frustrated and jealous of his competitors despite receiving significant funding for the company's technology achievements, and slowly grew mad and insane over the years until his death from moon dust poisoning.

• GLaDOS, an acronym for "Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System", is a rampant artificial intelligence computer systems that controls Aperture Science, and is the primary antagonist for the Portal series. She is voiced by Ellen McLain. She awakens the player-character Chell in the first game, tasking her through the dangerous testing course, but Chell manages to escape and appears to destroy her, though later revealed to have had her personality stored within a black box. Within the second game, Wheatley accidentally reawakens GLaDOS, and eventually convinces Chell to initiate a core transfer to replace her with himself. GLaDOS, placed into a module powered by a potato battery, is forced to work with Chell to depose Wheatley from power before the Aperture facility is destroyed.

• Personality Cores are portable, self-powered AIs that are spherical, with one eye and two handles. They are modules that were designed by Aperture Science to be installed on GLaDOS to augment her capabilities.
  • the Morality Core, which was installed onto GLaDOS to prevent her from flooding the labs with neurotoxin (as she had done once before). It accidentally falls off GLaDOS when Chell enters her chamber.
  • the Curiosity Core, that kept GLaDOS from killing Chell to watch what she would do. This core constantly asks questions to Chell.
  • the Intelligence Core, which reiterates a cake recipe with many unorthodox ingredients, referring to the cake that would be awarded to Chell at the end of the testing course.
  • the Anger Core, which, instead of speaking, only produces angry snarls and growls.
  • the Space Core, which is utterly fascinated by space and desires to go there. He constantly talks about space in a hyperactive manner. He eventually gets sucked into space with Wheatley. Later in the completely unrelated game of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, there is a mod made by Valve in which the space core falls from the sky, and is stuck of the planet Nirn. His character was inspired by an advert for the Oregon Coast Aquarium.[1] The lines and behavior of the Space Core have since become an Internet meme.

• ATLAS and P-body are the player characters in the co-op campaign of Portal 2. They are two robots that cannot speak and can only produce grunts, which are voiced by Dee Bradley Baker. They are equipped with their own portal guns which bears the colour of its user (blue and purple for ATLAS, yellow and red for P-body).

Aperture Science

Aperture Science was founded as Aperture Fixtures in the early 1940s by Cave Johnson. Aperture Fixtures was primarily dedicated to the manufacture and distribution of shower curtains – a low-tech portal between the inside and outside of a shower – with Cave Johnson winning the "Shower Curtain Salesman of 1943" award. Some time between 1943 and 1947 the company's name was changed to "Aperture Science Innovators". While this was initially done to make their shower curtains sound more hygienic, the company's focus would indeed soon shift to actual science. Cave Johnson purchased a large, abandoned salt mine in Upper Michigan in which Aperture Science's Enrichment Center would be built; however, there was at least one alternate location in Cleveland, Ohio.

Throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s, Aperture Science would begin its comprehensive testing and research practices. The best possible test subjects, the likes of Olympians, astronauts and war heroes were first chosen. They were also the second largest contractor after Black Mesa for the Department of Defense from 1952 to 1954. Aperture's developments in this period included Repulsion Gel, the Weighted Storage Cube, the 1500 Megawatt Super Colliding Super Button and the Aperture Science Portable Quantum Tunneling Device, an early and significantly larger version of the modern Portal Gun.

By the 1970s, Aperture Science was financially unstable. The Olympians, astronauts and war heroes that were used as test subjects were replaced with vagrants who were paid $60 for their time. Aperture Science would continue its research and created Propulsion Gel. In the 1980s, test participation became mandatory for all staff, raising the quality of the test subjects, but diminishing employee retention. Aperture's financial problems were severe at this time, but development continued. Moon rocks were used to create Conversion Gel, an efficient portal conductor. Cave Johnson would also be poisoned by his experiments with moon rocks and become deathly ill. As his health degraded he delegated his leadership to his assistant Caroline, asking that her consciousness be placed in a computer. Testing continued with the hope that passing through portals repeatedly might somehow cure Cave Johnson of his illness. Aperture Science also began development of its Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System, an artificial intelligence which would be used to oversee scientific testing.

In 1998, GLaDOS was brought online for the first time during Aperture Science's annual bring-your-daughter-to-work-day. GLaDOS instantly became self-aware and homicidal. GLaDOS flooded the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin, killing most of the scientists. Aperture Science was effectively shut down and placed into a permanent testing cycle by GLaDOS.

Who the hell made this fucking videogame?

Valve, the company who made: Half Life, Team Fortress and Counter Strike.