Portal 2 - Release - Announcement

Announcement

In January 2008, Valve spokesman Doug Lombardi told Eurogamer, "There'll be more Portal, for sure", and Portal designer Kim Swift confirmed that work on Portal 2 would begin the following month. Swift said multiplayer Portal was technically possible, but that it was "less fun than you'd think."

Portal 2 was officially announced on March 5, 2010 via Game Informer. Events during the preceding week foreshadowed the announcement. On March 1, Valve released a patch for Portal that included a new achievement, "Transmission Received", requiring the player to manipulate in-game radios. This revealed new sound effects that became part of an alternate reality game (ARG). The new effects included Morse code strings that suggested GLaDOS was rebooting and SSTV images from a grainy Aperture Science video. The images included hints to a BBS phone number that, when accessed, provided a large number of ASCII-based images relating to Portal and segments of Aperture Science documents. Many of these ASCII pictures were later published in the Game Informer reveal of the title. New ASCII images continued to appear on the BBS after the official announcement. Background on the ARG is embedded in additional SSTV images found in a hidden room in Portal 2. Valve's Adam Foster came up with the idea for the ARG, tying it to the Game Informer reveal, and he provided his own home phone line to run the BBS software on, as Valve's offices at the time were too modern to support the protocol. Foster estimates the ARG costed less than $100 to run.

A second Portal patch released on March 3 altered the game's ending sequence to show Chell being pulled back into the Aperture facility. Gaming journalists speculated that an announcement of Portal 2 was imminent. On March 5, Game Informer announced Portal 2's official release on the cover of its April issue. During the following week, Gabe Newell's speech accepting the Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Conference 2010 ended with a fake blue screen of death appearing on a screen behind him with a message purported to be from GLaDOS which hinted of further Portal 2 news at the upcoming E3 2010. Two weeks before the E3, game journalists received a cryptic e-mail, worded as a press release from Aperture Science, hinting that the presentation on Portal 2 would be replaced with "a surprise" jointly hosted by Aperture Science and Valve. This prompted speculation that the surprise would be the announcement of Half-Life 2: Episode Three, but Valve confirmed that it would be about Portal 2. The surprise was the announcement of Portal 2 on PlayStation 3.