Idea for PORTAL 3 floated at Valve

Erik Wolpaw, one of the main writers at Valve Corporation, has confirmed that he has floated an idea for Portal 3 at the company.

Wolpaw joined Valve in 2004 and worked on Half-Life 2: Episode One and Two as a writer. He provided writing for the original Portal in 2007 and its sequel Portal 2 in 2011, as well as working on Left 4 Dead (2008) and Artifact (2018). His other credits include Psychonauts (2005) for Double Fine Productions. He briefly left Valve in 2017 to work on Psychonauts 2, but returned to the company to work on the VR title Half-Life: Alyx (2020) and Aperture Desk Job (2022), a Portal spin-off designed to show off the featurs of the handheld Steam Deck.

Valve, infamously, have been reluctant to make a third "proper" game in any of their key franchises: Portal, Left 4 Dead and, obviously Half-Life, instead making two games and then various expansions and spin-offs (the Portal games are, in fact, set in the same universe as the Half-Life series). The internal philosophy at Valve is that the first game in a franchise is where you test the concept and the sequel is where you use all the ideas you couldn't use in the original for time or money reasons. A third game would be over-egging the pudding. However, Valve have teased a Half-Life 3 for many, many years, and recently suggested that it was back on the cards after Alyx's finale apparently teed up a continuation of the mainline series.

Wolpaw has indicated that his idea for a Portal 3 has been well-received internally at Valve and the idea is permutating around. However, it is now in active development at the moment and, given the existence of "Valve Time," it may be many years before (or even if) it leads to anything.

Still, it's another sign that Valve, who for the last twenty years have been able to simply rake in immense profits from their Steam online game service, might slowly be tilting back towards making more big games like the ones they were originally famous for.

The SF of Gaming

Where would computer games be without science fiction? Alien bad guys, stonking great railguns, cyborg protagonists and post-apocalyptic landscapes are ten-a-penny in games. The number of games out there without any SF or fantasy elements is tiny; even the historical simulation Civilization games allows Gandhi to build an army of death-dealing laser tanks and then fly to Alpha Centauri, whilst the Crusader Kings series postulates fantastical alternate timelines where Wales is a European superpower.

Scientifically inexplicable.

That said, SF in games is usually scenery rather than the focus of the setting. The socio-economic basis of why the alien Lord Mental, with access to vast resources and commanding a star-spanning empire, needs to invade Earth in the Serious Sam series remains resolutely unexplored. And how do those suicide bomber guys scream when they don't have a head anyway? The science in science fiction is often questionable in books (and almost non-existent on TV and in film), and even moreso in games.

Still, exceptions exist. Here's a look at some games which attempt to use real science as more than just wallpaper.

Frontier: Elite 2 - Real Astronomy & Newtonian Physics

Released in 1993, Frontier was David Braben's ambitious follow-up to the classic, medium-defining 1984 space sim Elite. Frontier allows you to take on the role of the captain of a spacecraft. You can indulge in trading goods between star systems, fighting pirates (or turning pirate yourself) or undertaking missions for one of several interstellar powers (the Federation, the Empire or numerous independent worlds, as well as various corporations). You can switch between spacecraft and upgrade them.

Where the game was truly stunning was that it simulated the entire Milky Way Galaxy on just a single floppy disk. 100 billion stars were located in the galaxy, and the several hundred closest to Earth were placed in their (more or less) correct astronomical positions, along with a few hundred other major stars. You could fly to the Pleiades (though it'd take a while), check out Polaris or skim the surface of Arcturus. The game also used real Newtonian physics, complete with effectively infinite inertia once you had fired your engines in a particular direction, and space stations simulating gravity through centrifugal force. You could even fly over planetary surfaces and land at starports.

Of course, the game looks pretty primitive by modern standards, 99% of the stars in the game are randomly placed and named and the Newtonian physics make space combat unintuitive and almost ridiculously difficult to pull off (and the fact that few later space games - I-War and Tachyon's nods to it side - use real physics may be down to Frontier's problems). But the ambition and scope are there. It will be interesting to see if Elite: Dangerous, due in 2014, manages to solve the issues whilst retaining the immense scale, scope and ambition of its forebear.

Damocles: Mercenary II - Comets and Time Dilation

Predating Frontier by a few years, Damocles similarly depicts an impressive 3D universe which allows you to land and take off from planets. The setting is much more limited, with just a single solar system on offer. The spacecraft is also merely a way of getting from planet to planet, with the focus being on your character wandering around (in first-person 3D; a stunning achievement in 1990). The premise is that the comet Damocles is about to crash into and destroy the planet Eris and your character has to find a way of stopping it. The game presents several possibilities, from the direct (finding and blowing up the comet with a mega-powerful antimatter bomb) to the sensible (redirecting the comet away from Eris onto a safer orbit by blowing up another, uninhabited body nearby).

One of the more interesting things about the game is that your spacecraft can accelerate to near-lightspeed to get around the system, but this results in time dilation. You can travel right across the system in minutes, but the doomsday clock will tick down at a ridiculous rate. This forces the player to find alternate ways of travelling around (teleporters being the favourite alternative, but their locations are unknown at the start of the game) to avoid the problem.

Syndicate - Cyberpunk Dystopia

Also released in 1993, Syndicate was an action-strategy game set in a dystopian cyberpunk future, where the world is controlled by corporations who influence and pacify citizens via chips in their brains. These chips can be subverted by the player, allowing them to take control of huge crowds of people during missions to be used as cannon fodder or a distraction. This notion of human/computer interfaces is only lightly touched upon in the game due to control limitations, although it does bring in other SF ideas such as robot policemen and massive corporate advertising boards (influenced by Blade Runner). Most sinister is the way the game postulates a future where governments are rump states at best, with the real power held by corporations and their private armies.

A sequel, Syndicate Wars, moved the game into 3D in 1996. Recently, several of the design team for Syndicate and its sequel announced a Kickstarter campaign for a 'spiritual sequel', Satellite Reign, that will expand upon many of the ideas in the original game and allow for things like hacking and more freeform approaches to missions.

Hostile Waters - Nanotech Singularity and Social Revolution

One of the greatest (though also underplayed) strategy games of all time, Hostile Waters (aka Antaeus Rising in the USA) places you in command of an immense aircraft carrier with orders to liberate a chain of newly-risen islands from the control of a hostile power. What at first appears to be a remake of the classic 1987 strategy title Carrier Command (itself given a lacklustre, official remake in 2012) quickly turns into a different beast. Part of this is down to the compelling fiction, created by writer Warren Ellis.

The game postulates a technological singularity (in 2012) which comes to pass due to the invention of Creation Engines, devices which use nanotechnology to break items apart and reassemble them at a molecular level. Anything can be turned into anything else. Rubbish can be transformed into food, sand into diamonds. This immediately removes scarcity - famine, lack of resources - as an issue for everyone on the planet and would seem to herald a golden age. The owners of the means of production, who are effectively out of a job, resist by trying to regulate the introduction of Creation Engines, resulting in a messy, bloody global civil war. At the end of the war the 'old guard' are defeated and everyone lives in a world of plenty. Needless to say, some of these old guard launch a new assault using weaponised Creation Engine technology...technology which gets out of hand very rapidly.

Dealing with SF hot topics like nanotechnology, the Singularity (not exactly in a robust way, though, as the post-2012 society is still pretty comprehensible to us), life-extension via 'saving' consciousness on AI systems, the conflicts of closed systems versus open ones and ideology versus religion, the game's storyline is surprisingly deep though arguably flawed: the world also being a secularist paradise with billions of people abandoning religion seems a bit far-fetched, though there are hints that the new society has a sinister side as well. All the more remarkable is that this background is there purely to explain the game's use of standard strategy tropes, like being able to build vehicles instantly on the battlefield. The fiction is impressive and well-thought-out, complementing the amazing gameplay very well.

Portal - Science as Fun

Released in 2007, Portal was a small game but a hugely influential one. The game is based around the idea that you can create two linked dimensional portals on certain surfaces, allowing for intelligent ways to solve apparently insurmountable puzzles. Jumping across a vast chasm is possible by creating a portal on the wall behind you and another at the bottom of the chasm: falling into the chasm builds up enough momentum to shoot through the portal, over the top of the chasm and landing safely on the other side.

The portal technology is of course highly speculative, but it's a rare example of a gaming taking its central scientific/technological premise (no matter how ludicrous) and exploring it intelligently. The 'science!' theme, the impressive AI antagonist, the game's remarkable sense of humour and it's bigger, better sequel all help cement the game's reputation as one of the finest first-person action games in existence.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Augmentation and Cyborgs

This prequel to 2000's classic Deus Ex deals with a number of important near-future issues. As well as the standard cyberpunk government/corporation tension, the game explores the theme of augmentation and using technology to enhance human abilities in depth and with intelligence. The notion of how much of our bodies we can replace and remain human is also a key theme: does the corporation 'own' protagonist Adam Jensen because they paid for the augmentations that allow him to live? A rich and involving game (let down a little by silly boss fights).

BioShock Infinite - An Infinity of Possibilities

This recent game is set in an alternate timeline in which a huge flying city called Columbia was built in the early 20th Century thanks to the invention of quantum engines, technology that never existed in our world. As the game progresses, the protagonist and the girl he was sent to save find themselves passing through tears in the fabric of reality into other universes, including some similar to our own and others completely different.

The 'many worlds' theory of quantum reality is a common theme in modern SF, but this is the first time a game successfully explores the same theme with some intelligence and uses it to tie together the disjointed narrative in a manner which makes sense.

Wasteland 2 - Post-Apocalyptic Wildlife

The upcoming Wasteland 2, from some of the same team that gave us the Fallout games, is a post-apocalyptic romp which makes few pretences towards scientific realism in its backstory or how anyone survived the nuclear apocalypse. However, the developers have called upon the services of real scientists to help portray environments and creatures, leading to the creation of the fearful giant hermit crab, which hides within the shells of abandoned and burned-out cars and gives the players a nasty surprise when they wander by.

As we can see, there are a few games around which do make more use of science and real SF ideas than as just a cheesy explanation for insane ultraviolence. Hopefully this is something we will see more of in the future.

See also: Polygon has interviews with the scientists who have consulted and advised on games such as Wasteland 2, BioShock Infinite, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the upcoming Outlast.

Wertzone Classics: Portal 2

Chell, a test subject at Aperture Science, has successfully destroyed the insane AI known as GLaDOS and escaped from the facility. Unfortunately, injured in the final battle, she was 'rescued' by a robot from the facility and returned to cold storage. Awakening many years later, Chell finds herself once against trapped in the facility. With the help of a friendly AI, Wheatley, she must flee once more...something made harder when GLaDOS is brought back online.


Released in 2007 as an add-on to the 'Orange Box' compilation, Portal was a surprise success for its developers, Valve. It won several Game of the Year awards and glowing plaudits for its conciseness and the cleverness of its central mechanic, not to mention the frequently hilarious writing (and the brilliant closing song). Portal 2 has a lot to live up to and is put in a difficult situation for a sequel. Sequels are usually bigger, more epic and larger in scale than the original, but the Portal concept wouldn't really work on a vaster canvas. Making a sequel to Portal that respected the original game without ruining the things that made it brilliant would therefore appear to be a tall order.

Happily, Valve have pulled it off. From start to finish Portal 2 is almost unimpeded brilliance. The game is longer than Portal, coming in at about eight hours compared to the original's three. Since even the splendid original game was risking becoming stale at the end, Valve have split the sequel into three clear sections. In the first Chell uses portals very much as in the first game and is aided by Wheatley and opposed by GLaDOS. At the end of this sequence Chell finds herself in the most ancient parts of the facility, where a very different set of puzzles await using different mechanics. In this section she has no enemies or opponents but is guided through the puzzles via messages pre-recorded by Aperture Science's long-deceased founder, Cave Johnson. After this she returns to the upper levels where an all-new set of challenges await, leading to the epic conclusion.

As such Valve neatly avoid what could have been the game's biggest pitfall, outliving its welcome. The shifts in tone, plot and game mechanics are handled well, but still combine to form a coherent game. The cast has been enlarged with the addition of Stephen Merchant (Ricky Gervais's wingman, who increasingly is outshining his partner) as Wheatley. Valve wanted a completely different type of vocal performance for Wheatley then you normally get in a video game and Merchant's half-ad-libbed dialogue is different and more immediate, not to mention hilarious. J.K. Simmons (best-known as J. Jonah Jameson in the Raimi Spider-Man movies) provides the recorded voice of Cave Johnson and his deadpan delivery of increasingly deranged dialogue is also excellent. Ellen McLain also returns as GLaDOS and, in one of the more inspired ideas in the game, is given more dramatic meat to work with as GLaDOS begins to suffer an immense internal struggle as she and Chell discover the secret past of Aperture Science.

Graphically, the game looks great with some impressive production design and animations. The Source Engine (eight years old in 2012) is definitely ageing, but nevertheless remains impressive. The puzzles are fairly fiendish and require some lateral thinking in order to make sense of all the new elements ('paints' that give different effects to surfaces, catapults that throw the player around, tractor beams and light-bridges), but the gradual introduction of these elements allows the player to get to grips with them effectively. There's a few puzzles near the end of the game that are really tough, but nothing too frustrating. More complex are the puzzles in co-op mode, but with two players working on solutions these shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Events in the game build and culminate in the final battle, which is once again impressive. However, the finale of the game must rank amongst the most bizarre - but also brilliant - in gaming history. From the unexpected opera serenade to Wheatley's closing, introspective monologue it's thoroughly entertaining. Things are left open for the continuation of Chell's story (either in further Portal games or possibly future Half-Life titles) but there is no cliffhanger.

Portal 2 (*****) is funny, clever, dramatic, well-acted and constantly inventive, and one of the best games in Valve's already stellar history. It is available now in the UK (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3) and the USA (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3).

Get PORTAL for free (for the next two weeks)

Valve Software are making their multi-award-winning game Portal available for free until 24 May for PC and Mac owners. This is to both celebrate the arrival of Valve's entire back-catalogue (including the Half-Life series and Team Fortress II) on the Mac OS platform, and begin generating publicity for the release of Portal 2 on PC, Mac, X-Box 360 and PS3 in the autumn.


Portal sees the player having to escape from a test facility using an experimental 'portal gun' to teleport around locations solving increasingly fiendish puzzles whilst being threatened by the facility's somewhat deranged AI, known as GLADOS. The game was an unexpected huge critical and commercial success when it was released as part of Valve's Orange Box compilation in late 2007. The game generated further success when its somewhat demented title song, 'Still Alive', became a big hit thanks to its inclusion in the Rock Band game.



For the price of £/$/€0.00 and with system requirements only somewhat more taxing than those needed to run Microsoft Word, this is a no-brainer really. Go get it people (if you can, as Valve's servers seem to be crumbling under the weight of demand).

Clarification: that is free in the sense that if you get it now it will be yours forevermore, not that it will vanish after May 24th. And yes, you will need to install Steam (for free) to use it.

PORTAL 2 officially announced

Valve have confirmed that Portal 2 will ship as a stand-alone release (no Maroon Box or something this time around, then) for Christmas 2010. No platform announced, but based on previous releases we can guess it'll be for PC and 360 first, followed by PS3 a few weeks or months later. Next month's Game Informer magazine in the US will feature the full lowdown.


Splendid news. Portal is one of the most impressive and enjoyable games of recent years. As a bonus, Valve have also been rather unsubtly hinting that Steam and all of their Source-based games will soon be available on Macs and OS X soon as well.

No HALF-LIFE 2 Episode 3 in 2010, but PORTAL 2 announcement on the way?

According to Game Informer magazine, Valve are not planning to ship Half-Life 2: Episode 3 in 2010. Episode 2 was released as part of the 'Orange Box' pack in 2007, alongside Team Fortress 2 and Portal, and word on Episode 3 has been very limited since then, despite the original plan being for all three episodes to be released in just eighteen months following the release of Half-Life 2 itself in November 2004. The magazine goes on to speculate that it's possible that Episode 3 may have even been cancelled and replaced with a Half-Life 3 running on a next-gen version of the Source Engine.

At the same time that this disappointing news has been circulating, an artificial reality game has appeared via the latest Steam updates hinting that further developments on the Portal 2 front may be imminent. The Portal team have been working on the sequel since shortly after the original game was released, despite the departure of original designer Kim Swift a few months ago to work for another company, and it sounds like some sort of announcement or preview is now on the way. A Portal 2 could certainly ease the waiting pains for the release of Episode 3.

Wertzone Classics: Portal

Every now and then a game comes along that requires serious attention, simply because it is pure genius. Usually such games are mind-boggingly simple, and feature an idea so obvious that it makes other developers slap themselves in the face in disbelief that they didn't think of it. Portal is the latest such game to follow in this tradition.

Portal follows the adventures of a young lady named Chell, who, for reasons never explained, has been held in stasis for an unspecificed amount of time at an Aperture Science Enrichment Facility, waiting to undergo testing and training on the Handheld Portal Device 04 (aka, 'the portal gun'). Chell doesn't encounter any other people, but is guided through the testing facility by GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System), an extremely eccentric AI which becomes increasingly demented as the game proceeds, directing Chell into increasingly hazardous test chambers (including a 'live-fire course usually used to test military androids') but urging her to continue through the promise of cake.

Each test chamber consists of a puzzle which the player must overcome by use of the portal gun. The gun can create portals on certain wall surfaces. Two portals can be created. By simply stepping through one, you step out of the other. Puzzles can be very simple (crossing a chasm by firing a portal onto a wall on the far side and another next to you, and stepping through) or mind-crushingly complex. Since you retain your forward momentum when you pass through a portal, some puzzles involving crossing vast gaps (with non-portal-compatible walls on the far side) can be overcome by generating a portal at the bottom of the chasm, another one on the wall behind you, falling down the chasm at tremendous speed, which then gives you momentum when you pass through the portal to cross the vast gap. Dealing with sudden shifts in orientation and direction is key to progressing through the game.

The puzzles are complicated by the increasing addition of dangerous obstacles, such as energy spikes you have to direct through portals to generators to open up the next area of the test chamber but which will kill you if you touch them, and the sudden addition of robotic sentry guns to certain chambers (which comically tell you they hold no ill wishes when you inevitably destroy them). You also have some help in the shape of the 'weighted companion cube' or 'box' which you can use to press switches, bat aside energy spikes or deflect sentry gun bullets. For a non-sentient inanimate object, the companion cube soon becomes a trusted ally in the game and the puzzle which requires you to 'euthanise' one of them is strangely disturbing.

Of course, there's only so many times you can solve puzzles revolving around portals and the laws of ballistics before it becomes a bit old, and to their credit the developers realise this and only provide twenty test chambers. The completion of the last chamber triggers the second (much shorter) stage of the game where you have to use your carefully-gained portal skills to escape the facility once it becomes clear that something is not right in the world outside (this is where the link to the Half-Life universe is hinted at), leading to the fiendishly satisfying final confrontation and the best end games credits sequence ever.

Portal is a tremendoulsy simple idea, fantastically well-executed. I can imagine the Half-Life 2 team at Valve feeling a bit embarrassed about the fuss they made about the gravity gun when Portal shows off the capabilities of the Source Engine's physics engine with much greater finesse, elegance and originality. At about 2-3 hours in length, it doesn't outstay its welcome (and your brain will be aching by the time you get to the game's conclusion) but it does leave you wanting more. Where a possible Portal 2 could go is unclear, but the game hints that the Aperture Science facility has been abandoned due to something crazy happening in the world outside, and it isn't too hard to tie this in with the Combine occupation of Earth in the Half-Life 2 series of games. Whether this means that any sequel will see Chell taking on the Combine with the portal gun, or perhaps involve her meeting Gordon Freeman, is unclear, but it's an intriguing notion.

Portal (*****) is superb. It's original, it's funny, it's well-executed, it's perfectly-timed and has a sense of humour as black as midnight. It's part of The Orange Box for PC, PS3 and X-Box 360 (see the Half-Life 2: Episode 2 review for Amazon links) and is available now. Go get it!