Posted: Thu Mar 04, 2010 7:47 pm Post subject: Portal Update...
just found this out:
Quote:
The Secret Portal Radio Update
At some point, you may have been browsing through your installed games on Steam and watched the occasional update occur. ‘Just routine maintenance,’ you might think. Well, the vast majority of the time, you’d be right. Developers will be sending tiny janitors made from 0s and 1s to buff, polish and bug fix.
Yesterday however, an update happened that wasn’t so routine. It was something special for Portal fans.
Valve applied a semi-surreptitious update to its much-lauded Portal. The company is well-known for sending out press releases for immediate release, revealing such banalities as how many sandwiches were eaten for lunch and how the punctuation in a subtitle was fixed. The new Portal update though landed stealthily, with only a small update on the product page mentioning a new achievement and changes to meet federal regulations governing radio transmission.
*The Portal Radio Update Explained The Secret Portal Radio Update Explained
Achievement whoring, finally put to good use!
Everyone was confused and, worse, intrigued. Hardcore fans booted up the game to find out just what the Sam Hill was going on.
Upon firing up Portal, everything seemed normal though and it took a fair few hours of disappointment before someone noticed the lights on the radio props had changed colour. Someone decided to pick one up and try and carry it through the game, like the Gnome in Episode 2. That plan failed when people ran into the forcefields that close off each room, which destroy any props you try to carry with you. Nothing new there. The game has always done that – but post-update there was a new burst of static sound when a radio went through the portal.
It was quickly discovered that moving radios into certain positions in the game provoked a similar response. It turns out that there are 26 of these locations dotted around the game to find and a radio is provided when a particular room or puzzle has a location to find. Once you’ve found a location, the radio’s light will turn from red to green to denote that you’ve finished that part of the achievement. Baffling, but that’s just the first layer of the conundrum.
*The Portal Radio Update Explained The Secret Portal Radio Update Explained *The Portal Radio Update Explained The Secret Portal Radio Update Explained
Some of the first unscrambled images!
The plot thickened when a bunch of nerds of notable acuity started pulling the .WAV files from the game folders and tried to figure out what the relevance of the static was. Why would Valve issue such an odd update that contained only random noise? The answer was simply that the noise wasn’t random at all.
It turned out that the sound bites contained hidden messages in the form of images that would only reveal themselves when the files were run through a Slow Scan Television (SSTV) application. The rabbit hole ran deep and fans found themselves involved in an elaborate treasure hunt or alternate reality game (ARG) You can check out the decoding process and see exactly what was uncovered here.
While this is exciting in itself, the images themselves only serve to thicken the mystery further. Keyboard buttons, skulls, documents and what appear to be robots (or possibly chicken skeletons – the debate rages on on that point) all appear and often with the Aperture Science logo somewhere in the shot.
There are equations which appear hidden in the code too, from a range of scientific fields, such as this one from basic wave mechanics, for example.
Deeper Down The Rabbit Hole
These images in particular are causing some hot debate. This is largely because they resemble an enemy that was removed from Half Life 2 called the Super Soldier which could be a hint that it is getting reinstated in a Portal sequel or possibly Half Life 2: Episode 3.
It’s not worth getting too excited about that rumour just yet though, as it’s also hypothesised that the image is an ASCII-art version of a pair of chicken skeletons. Either way, Valve is staffed by some strange people.
Even that isn’t the end of the puzzle though, as Steam forum goers then took the number sequences from the decoded images and ran them through an MD5 translator. The result was an apparent telephone number from the Kirkland, Washington area – which is close to where Valve is headquartered. Other fragments were unscrambled too – the first .WAV file in the sequence turned out to give a sequence of beeps and blips that were revealed to be morse code, for example. The morse code spelled out “LOL”.
*The Portal Radio Update Explained Down The Rabbit Hole
Click to enlarge this information taken from the Aperture BBS
However, the landline turned out not to be a telephone or landline number at all. It was a data line for an old BBS board. A username and password was figured out by referring back to the cryptic images deciphered using the SSTV and, low and behold, access was granted to an Aperture Science bulletin board. It’s filled with a lot of red herrings and nonsense in the form of yet more ASCII art and notes, but did you honestly expect the staff at Aperture Science to be completely sane people?
Here’s an excerpt, for those of you who are having trouble reading the blurred fonts of the ASCII images. It’s supposedly penned by Aperture Science founder CJohnson and it’s copied verbatim, spelling mistakes and all.
“Aperture Science is built on three pillars. Pillar one: Science without results is just witchcraft. Pillar two: Get results or you're fired. Pillar three: if you suspect a coworker of bin' a witch, report them immediately. I cannot stress that enough. Witchcraft will not be tolerated.”
"Science isn't about why, it's about why not. You ask: Why is so much of our science dangerous? I say: Why not marry safe science if you love it so much. In fact, why not invent a special safety door that won't hit you in the butt on the way out, because you are fired."
"Plus, in the event of your death, I personally guarantee that, thanks to the form you were required to sign this morning, your family will not suffer the indignities of a prolonged and costly legal battle against Aperture Science. Trust me, I am rich, and it is a burden I would not wish on anyone."
Portal's new, extended finale
One piece of the ASCII artwork that's particularly intriguing is a depiction of a sterile looking room that fits the Portal aesthetic and which some hope is an obscured screenshot from sequel to Portal, which is one of the things this viral ARG could be building towards. If it’s building to anything at all.
There’s the rub, naturally. There’s nothing to indicate that Valve is doing all this for any particular reason – it could just be a perverse bit of tomfoolery that means absolutely nothing. It wouldn’t be the first time the company has delighted in playing with it’s audience. Long-time Valve fans will remember the similar ‘First and Second Test’, which hid concept art from HL2 on Valve’s official site.
There’s still a lot of discussion going on about this latest little ARG, with the Steam forums still ablaze with discussion about what’s going on. The hardest part of all this is simply keeping track of all the information and learning to pool it all somewhere where fans can debate it. It why collected charts like these are so useful, as well as the Half-Life 2 wikia. Without them fans have been slow to pick up on some hints and updates - such as the new Portal ending, embedded above, which lengthens the finale by about 15 seconds and was added in a second update.
Right now, it seems as if all the actual data and content has been uncovered by Valve’s industrious (and scarily intelligent) fanbase - though all that could change at any moment, if Valve drops another mystery patch. All that’s going on now is a debate of what it all means, with Valve proving as recalcitrant as you’d expect and refusing to offer any clues. All that has been offered is the advice to "look under the elephant green", with fans debating whether that's an anagram of "the green panel" or guidance enough to investigate Kirkland's town hall in real life. Apparently that's where the BBS line is located and, viewed from above, the building looks like an elephant - leading some hardcore devotees to wonder if excavation of the nearby gardens is called for.
It’s still unclear whether this is a covert announcement for Portal 2, whether a new map pack or something is on the way or whether it's linked to the hinted-to announcement that Steam is coming to Macs.
The only thing that we are clear on is: this is a triumph.
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