“One of the reasons we kept Portal as simple as Narbacular Drop, is that we found out that the more complications you add to a game, the more you’re increasing the chances that you’re going to do something stupid. We’d be trying to do a lot of different stuff, rather than focusing on one concept. We found that having a simple game design allows you to spend your time polishing that idea.”
Valve saw Narbacular Drop and were immediately impressed by the Portal concept, snapping up the talented graduates and teaming them up with the Half-Life crew in the hope of creating something unique to add to Gordon Freeman’s universe. “We’re all big HL fans, so why not! We met up with Marc Laidlaw, the lead writer on the HL games, and just made sure that everything fitted in OK. We talked to the other Episode teams, to see how we can get the games to fit together - so in Episode Two, there’s a mention of the Aperture Science facility.”
The star of Portal is GLaDOS, the mixed-up psychopathic female AI boss of the testing facility - but how did the idea of this quirky, robot enemy happen? “We eventually had a game that was fun and interesting to play, but was just very dry,” continues Kim. “So we talked to Eric Wolpaw, who does our writing, and he was able to bring a lot of personality to the table.
“We tried a few different timings of when she should start to go batty, and we basically came up with that particular evolution of her personality. You know you’ve succeeded when someone completes a puzzle, smiles, then completely stops what they’re doing to listen to GLaDOS talk, laugh, then get into the elevator.”
