We were due to announce Portal 2 to the public, and had lined up a mainstream marketing push through Game Informer magazine.
Portal 2 announcementįast-forward a few years to being happily installed at Valve. I definitely learned not to underestimate their sleuthing capabilities. EBCDIC text, GPS coordinates for the Valve office - those fans figured it out pretty quickly. Quite obviously, it took the simulated form of a post-apocalyptic numbers station, seemingly broadcasting numbers (in Polish!) which encoded a secret message. The website for MINERVA, my Half-Life 2 game mod, ended up being effectively in-fiction, with the character Minerva giving motivations, cryptic archive materials and disguised download links in the form of a broken scientific report - relaying her findings in this fictional world.Īlong the way, I inadvertently acquired a job at Valve. My level design career started more as fulfilling a desire to create new worlds than from a want to play more computer games - soon releasing well-received maps for Doom 2 without having ever finished playing through either Doom 1 or 2. Various creative writing exercises even from primary school included detailed maps and plans for imaginary locations and buildings, artificial letters and newspapers - carefully crumpled, torn and artificially aged with tea and flame.Įxtending this kind of behaviour to the computer world made more than a little sense. I've always been obsessed with the literary concept of the ' false document' - fictional worlds extended through apparently real maps, documents, letters and systems. Estimated time to 'solve' the intial puzzles: seven hours.Īctual time to solve: seven hours and sixteen minutes. A 21st-century treasure hunt, built using real-world systems and knowledge.Ī relatively small-scale, incredibly low-budget project. In this article, I'll be describing the puzzle design behind Valve's Portal 2 announcement, in which players across the internet collaborated in decoding mysterious audio broadcasts, brute-forced an MD5 hash then redistributed never-before-seen imagery from Portal 2, obtained from an incredibly slow, 1980s-style bulletin board system. It's quite possible to break outside the usual boundaries and use the real world itself as the setting for your fictional game world - reusing existing physical, logical and societal rules and constraints to implement your game.īut, in a world of near-infinite complexity and endless interlocking systems, how do you tell your players what's part of the game and what's an irrelevant part of reality? How can you design puzzles where literally anything could be interpreted as a clue? It does not need to limit itself to traditionally game-specific platforms, be they hardware or software.
A 'game' can be built in any sufficiently complex system.
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