Monday, April 25, 2011

Portal 2 release mania

The big release I was talking about was of course Portal 2. And the way it was released blew everyones minds. It all started as an potato-based april fools joke, where Valve released a game bundle on steam, In the days since, updates and cryptic messages have appeared both across the Internet and in the Potato sack games (the game bundle). At first it was merely simple messages or cryptic clues, such as strings of numbers or in-game glyphs, but soon more and more clues surfaced, eventually leading to potatoes invading the games en force.  A week before schedueled release a mysterious page went up, on it was only a timer. It was counting down to something, and nobody knew anything exept that it had something to do with the portal 2 release. Everyone was of course hoping for an early release, but we know Valve (the company behind portal), and no way in hell would these wishes come true. They are not exactly known for early releases. A couple of hours before the timer would reach zero, a message from GLaDOS appeared which ended with this: 


"The time is near, humans. But it is not here yet. Tomorrow you will be given
 the final test. Then it will be entirely in your hands when I am freed."


Then at est. 19:00 GMT+1 friday night the timer ran out and a new site came up, with just that, the final test. Valve had collected 13 indie games that we could play, and collect potatoes in to power up GLaDOS so that the game could release early. (If you think the potatoes sound weird, i guess you havent played portal). So over the weekend there were tens of thousands people playing these games and collecting potatoes, and we got the game out around 12 hours earlier than chedueled time. That doesn't sound like alot, but the event was absolutely crazy and a lot of fun. I am so glad Valve made this release into such a big event, it was more than i had hoped for, even though it was almost unbearably nerve wrecking at some points. Frankly Valve is my absolute favorite game company of all time. 

The site is still up here where you can see the games, GLaDOS' messages etc.
Also a wiki site was made just for this special occasion, where you can view all the announsements and news that was posted during the event.




2 comments:

I prefere comments to be in english, but all comments are of course welcome :)

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...