The Portal story never made much sense to me. OK, GLaDOS was built to facilitate testing but then slowly went mad. But why didn’t somebody else on the outside notice this and do something about it? Actually, it seemed they had, since at the beginning of Portal 2, GLaDOS had been deactivated. But who did this? And why did they leave the rest of the facility running? Why were there human beings in suspended animation, anyway? What purpose did that serve?
Then again, I’ve never been good at picking up on the plots of games that don’t spoon-feed it to you. I played through all the Half-Life games and thought “huh, that was kind of cool, shooting all those bad guys and blowing stuff up.” Then I read the plot summaries on Wikipedia and thought “wait, what? THAT’s what this was all about? Where are they getting all that information? Where was all that in the game?”
I am genuinely amazed that someone thought that in Portal 1, after the last test chamber, you were supposed to just let yourself be lowered into the fire and killed, and that that was the end of the game.
I’ve tried looking into it, but I remain fuzzy on the whole history of the setting. I think Portal and its sequel are supposed to take place after the apocalypse, or perhaps in the midst of the alien invasion featured in the Half-life games so that there is nobody coming by to see what’s happened to this wrecked science lab.
Well, Aperture is the company that initially proposed using portal technology to make a shower curtain, so it’s not like the people running it were really all that bright. A point made over and over by going through the older testing facilities and listening to Cave Johnson in Portal 2. The Repulsion Gel was supposed to be a dietetic pudding substitute.
The other point is that GLaDOS was activated the same day as the Black Mesa Incident, which meant that humanity had bigger problems than one homicidal AI running endless tests. The player deactivates GLaDOS by beating Portal, and then reactivates her due to following the stupidity of Wheatley in Portal 2.
It’s been a while since I played either, but I got the impression that Aperture Science was just so labyrinthine and decrepit that whole parts of their facility were closed off and forgotten about, GlaDOS included.
Aperture was always secretive and secluded, and most of the facility was hidden away underground and inaccessible. From the outside, it just looked like a tech startup that had lost a few key government contracts and dwindled away to nothing. The only hints as to what was really going on were sales pitches that the DoD laughed off as the ravings of a madman and which were classified to anyone else.
[spoiler]GLaDOS wasn’t created to facilitate testing. It was intended as a route to immortality for the founder and CEO of Aperture, Cave Johnson, from which he could continue to run the company and facility. When it became evident that he wouldn’t live long enough for the development to be completed, he instructed that his assistant Caroline succeed him as CEO–apparently in perpetuity, as she was uploaded into GLaDOS. GLaDOS was activated, with Caroline’s personality core, on Bring Your Daughter to Work (as a test subject) Day. Unfortunately, design flaws meant that she awoke murderously psychotic, and she immediately tried to kill everyone. She was stopped, but Aperture continued to work on her, trying various things to inhibit her homicidal behavior. The Morality Core didn’t do that, but it did make her subtle enough–just barely–to make the scientist who created it think that it had. Believing that he had corrected the problem, he was persuaded to allow her access to the resources she needed to eventually kill nearly everyone in the facility. The exceptions were Chell, Rattman, and however many of Aperture’s other human test subjects happened to be in stasis at the time. (Aperture was prone to wholesale–and decidedly inhumane–human testing, and apparently kept a bunch of test subjects on ice as handy replacements.)
It’s speculated that that happened around the same time that rival company Black Mesa created an interdimensional portal, resulting in an event that combined the most charming aspects of an alien invasion and a zombie apocalypse. Consequently, people outside the facility were too busy to inquire why Aperture had gone quiet.[/spoiler]
Yes, but it ends with a cake in a room full of racks of personality cores, some of which start coming on line before a mechanical arm snuffs out the candle on the cake. The implication is these included a backup of GLaDOS as well as other unused spheres. Some of these spheres engaged in haphazard attempts at repair and maintenance, including reassembling GLaDOS, but not reactivating her. (Until Wheatley did it by accident when he arrived with Chell.)
At the risk of being whooshed, what makes you think Wheatley was ever human? He was an Artificial Stupidity–er, “Intelligence Dampening”–Sphere that was created as one of the attempts to block GLaDOS’s homicidal tendencies. His purpose was deluge her with “an endless stream of terrible ideas” as a distraction. It worked about as well as you’d expect.
I don’t think that GLaDOS was entirely, or even primarily, an upload of Caroline.
I think that she was primarily what she was presented as being: An artificial intelligence created to do testing. When it came time to do the spoilered thing, they just used the most powerful computer they had available, which was GLaDOS. See, for instance, her quote “Now little Caroline is in here, too”: Caroline is a separate personality, sharing hardware with GLaDOS. Nor do I think that there were any other human uploads among Aperture’s AIs, or at least there’s no evidence for them.
As for why GLaDOS went homicidal, I have a pet theory of my own. It all came from a careless tech answering a question poetically instead of directly. GLaDOS was created and programmed to have an overriding drive to do Science. But what is Science? She didn’t know, so she asked. And the poor tech she asked probably said something like “Science is the way that humans overcome adversity and survive in a hostile world”. So GLaDOS, in the pursuit of Science, created adversity and a hostile world for humans to overcome and survive. The first few lines of “Still Alive” are sincere: “This is a triumph. I’m making a note here, huge success. It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.” She’s happy because for the first time, with Chell, she’s actually achieved the Science she’s been striving for, because it’s the first time a human has overcome and survived.
Didn’t Ratman survive? He found a dying Chell and put her in the life-support chamber where she started Portal 2..
I think. Again, the lore still confuses me.
[spoiler]Partly correct. Rattman survived the neurotoxin attack that wiped out most of he facility. (This was partly because he wasn’t as boneheaded as the researcher who believed GLaDOS was under control, and partly because his paranoid schizophrenia actually left him somewhat prepared for dealing with a homicidal machine that was out to get him.) He didn’t survive “testing” in the sense of completing GLaDOS’s puzzle deathtraps, but I think surviving her other ongoing murder attempts counts enough to be a strike against Chronos’s theory.
He didn’t put Chell in the stasis chamber, though. One of the reactivated sphere-bots did that. He tried to get her out of it, but was wounded by turrets and couldn’t reach her. Power to the stasis chambers was going to run out, so he diverted power to Chell’s to keep her alive. He had no way to set it to wake her, so she stayed in stasis for a very long time.
This mostly doesn’t appear in the games, but it’s covered in the “Lab Rat” comic that bridges them.[/spoiler]
Eh, I don’t think that’s such a huge hole in the theory. Maybe GLaDOS was happy that a second human had survived, and she was happy about Rattman, too. Maybe she didn’t know that Rattman was still alive. Maybe she figured he didn’t count, because he never went through the formal tests. The point is that she was actually happy about Chell surviving.
How far into the apocalypse are we by Portal 2? Is there a world for Chell to rejoin? Is she basically feral, having been a child at a science fair when the shit all went down?
It’s undefined, I believe. The wake-up message reels off a bunch of nines (9999999), which would imply that Chell’s been under for more than 27 thousand years, but that’s pretty implausible, given the state of the rest of the facility. More likely is that the system, which is failing and was only designed for stays of 50 days at a time, is glitched. Wheatley just says that it’s been “quite a lot longer” than a few months. My guess, given the degree to which the exposed parts of the facility have deteriorated and become overgrown, is that it was at least a few years, but probably not more than 20. (Twenty would also make it line up neatly with Gordon’s revival, I believe.)
Chell’s potato clock presentation has childish drawings and spelling errors, suggesting that she was pretty young at that point, but she was old enough to participate in the science fair as part of Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. Maybe 10? However, we also have the test subject questionnaire in her files, on which she apparently answered an essay question in binary, and which resulted someone deciding she was too stubborn to use as a test subject. We also know there was an intervening period after GLaDOS’s initial activation when Aperture was trying various things to rein in her homicidal tendencies, but before the final lockdown. I would infer that there was time between the events for Chell to grow up before the first game.
The timeline’s been retconned a bit, so it’s a little fuzzy, but I’d say it’s unlikely that Chell could reasonably be called “feral”.
It’s been years since I played Portal, so I reinstalled it tonight and played through. I’d forgotten some of the puzzles, and also how my head spins if I play too long. Oddly, most of the great GlaDOS dialog I remember wasn’t in this one, so it must be in Portal 2, which I will probably also play though soon.
There’s a lot more opportunity for GLaDOS dialog in Portal 2, given that you have multiple sorts of relationships with her over the course of the game. Plus yet more in the multiplayer, because the way she interacts with ATLAS and Peabody is very different from how she interacts with humans.
Thanks for the recommendation. I installed it and it looks great, but the controls are driving me nuts. In the original Portals (and I just played through both of them), you could let up on the keys and you’d pretty much stay in place. If you had to jump in one spot, or fall straight down, you could. But I’m barely in to Portal 3. There’s a puzzle I think I have figured out, jump off one ledge, off the repulsion gel, and on to a slightly higher ledge. Used to be you could just bounce in place and time your forward motion to reach the new ledge at the peak of your jump. But I can’t zero out my movement on this jump. I’m either drifting a little bit forward or a little bit backward; I either don’t get to the second ledge and fall back down or I hit my head on it on the way up.
I have found that Mel has a lot of spots with surfaces that are unstable but shouldn’t be (like the top of a desk that you slide off of if you try to stand on it), and the graphics seem to be a bit jittery, even on low quality.
The environment is also less interactive than I’d like. You can’t pick up all of the loose items lying around, like you can in the actual Portal games.
Still, there was clearly a lot of work that went into making it.
Yeah, it was kind of interesting that you could pick up the chairs and radios and whatnot, but I don’t recall that ever being necessary to solve a puzzle or make progress in the game. The navigation problem I’m having has got me stuck. At least I think it does, maybe this isn’t the solution to the puzzle. I’ve got another idea of how to try and make the jump.
It’s not the interactivity I like so much as the extravagant world building. Those deep salt mines are just absolutely massive. And I love the various stages in the history of Aperture, the gung-ho '50s to the dreary '70s, with logos, decor, and equipment to match. I think it would have been fabulous to see more of that, maybe a Jetsonian future of flying cars and rocket belts. Couldn’t make that work with the current plot, though. The decline has to occur within Cave Johnson’s lifetime.