Student-Designed Puzzler Portal Video Game
7 Indie Game Developers Team Up with Valve Studios for Portal Hit
The story of how Portal came to be will inevitably become one of the Cinderella stories of game design. Seven students at DigiPen Institute of Technology came up with a completely original concept for their senior project, which they gave the unique name Narbacular Drop to help it show up in Google searches.
Valve Software Hires 7 Students from DigiPen
DigiPen, located in Redmond, Washington, holds an annual expo to show off their Seniors’ game projects, and at the 2005 convention, an employee of Valve Software was walking the show floor scouting for new ideas. This employee, representing one of America’s biggest game development studios, discovered the project and asked the students to show it to Gabe Newell, Valve's founder. After demoing it for him at the Valve offices, Newell hired them on the spot.
"We stood around in the parking lot afterwards gibbering to ourselves for about 20 minutes,” Kim Swift, 1 of the 7 students, told IGN.com.
The Portal Concept
What is this amazing idea that was unique enough to earn all seven of them spots on one of the world’s most prestigious development teams? The concept driving Portal is both simple and revolutionary: you awaken inside a labyrinth-like test chamber and are quickly given the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device.
This gun (which is the only real “weapon” you ever use in the game) gives you the ability to create on most flat surfaces two portals, one orange and one blue. Anything that goes in the blue portal comes out the orange portal, and vice versa. The gameplay itself pans out in a linear sequence of first-person puzzles, all of which must be solved by creating portals with the portal gun.
The Portal Game Narrative Backdrop
The mind-bending concept of portals is not the only thing separating Portal from every other game to come out this year: the game is also darkly and shockingly humorous. It’s genuinely funny in a way most games simply aren’t. GLAdOS, the computer AI who leads you through the test chambers and the game’s only real character, is written with more brilliance than seen in any video game to date. Her wit and morbidity elevate Portal from merely a great idea to a well-executed cinematic masterpiece.
The game technically contains only 19 stages, but without spoiling anything, Portal is much longer than it initially appears. In addition, unlockable advanced levels and challenge modes (where you attempt to complete previous levels using the fewest footsteps, portals, or in the shortest time possible) and the promise of user-created maps extend the game’s life a fair amount, but still, the main game is at most only a couple hours long. However, this plays to the game’s advantage; it’s long enough that the puzzles have time to get quite complex and challenging and is a thoroughly satisfying experience once it ends, but short enough that the gameplay never gets stale or repetitive.
The Ideal Bite-Sized Video Game
Really, Portal has everything you could ask for from a $20 game: a movie-length experience that is entertaining from start to finish with brilliant writing, innovative gameplay, and a significant amount of replay value. Nothing like it has ever been done before, and until the seven-strong team at Valve releases something else as fresh as Portal, nothing like it will be done any time soon.
Portal is available as part of game bundle The Orange Box on PC or Xbox 360, or by itself through download via Steam on PC.
