Misplaced Pages

#989010

101-547: Portal is a series of first-person puzzle-platform video games developed by Valve . Set in the Half-Life universe, the two main games in the series, Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011), center on a woman, Chell , forced to undergo a series of tests within the Aperture Science Enrichment Center by a malicious artificial intelligence , GLaDOS , that controls the facility. Most of

202-632: A raycasting engine, giving it a visual fluidity seen in future games MIDI Maze and Wolfenstein 3D . It was followed in 1983 by the split-screen Capture the Flag , allowing two players at once, and foreshadowing a common gameplay mode for 3D games of the 1990s. The arrival of the Atari ST and Amiga in 1985, and the Apple IIGS a year later, increased the computing power and graphical capabilities available in consumer-level machines, leading to

303-649: A "Weighted Cube", effectively a crate. These puzzles require the use of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, the portal gun. The gun can shoot two portals, colored differently for identification, on any flat surface that is painted with a specific paint containing moon dust. Once both portal ends are placed, the player can walk the character between them, or carry objects with the portal gun through them. Portal ends can be re positioned as often as necessary, but certain actions, such as walking through "emancipation grills" or moving

404-675: A bridge from a limited set of parts to cross a river or chasm, using physics simulations to test if the bridge will hold up against traffic crossing it. Bridge Constructor Portal adds in elements from the Portal series, such as portals, as part of the construction challenge. The game is set within Aperture Laboratories, with the puzzles monitored by GLaDOS. The game released on December 20, 2017, for personal computers and mobile devices, and later in 2018 for PlayStation 4 , Xbox One , and Nintendo Switch consoles. Aperture Hand Lab

505-514: A film adaptation of the Portal series. In 2016, Abrams stated that he still has plans to direct these films in the future, with both films in the writing stage. Abrams confirmed in May 2021 that the film adaptation was still in the works as they were still working on a script for the film from Warner Bros. Pictures . Portal Prelude is a 2008 single-player mod that takes place before the events of Portal . A remastered version using Nvidia RTX Remix

606-424: A first person perspective include amateur flight simulations , combat flight simulators , dating sims , driving simulators , visual novels , immersive sims , and walking sims , although it has virtually been used in all genres, including survival horror and stealth games , either as main perspective or for specific actions or sections. Games with a first-person perspective are usually avatar -based, wherein

707-406: A first-person perspective where players aim at moving targets on a stationary screen. They in turn evolved into rail shooters , which also typically employ a first-person perspective but move the player through levels on a fixed path. Rail shooter and shooting gallery games that use light guns are called light gun shooters . The most popular type of game to employ a first-person perspective today

808-540: A free DLC for owners of the original game on PC. It was released on December 8, 2022. Portal 2 was released as a standalone game in April 2011 on both computers and consoles. It is considered as one of the greatest video games of all time by numerous publications and critics. It received acclaim for its gameplay, pacing, dark humor , writing, the voice work of McLain, Merchant, and Simmons, and its challenging but surmountable learning curve . Portal: Companion Collection

909-431: A further level of realism by implementing a rotating point of view, thus creating the effect of turning corners left and right, in addition to just walking forward. In 1988, Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode featured first-person shooter levels and included a sniper rifle for assassinating an enemy agent at long range using an unsteady sniper scope. The same year saw the release of Arsys Software 's Star Cruiser . In

1010-431: A game that can do well and be educational", and was already working with schools to develop lesson plans around the game. In one example, Valve brought in students from nearby Evergreen School to watch them interact with the game in an educational setting. As part of this effect, the company promoted Portal for free use by any user during September 2011. In speaking at the 2012 Games for Change Festival, Newell said that

1111-481: A limited Steamworks interface. Valve brought in writer Jay Pinkerton formerly with National Lampoon , and Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek to assist Wolpaw with the larger story. They built on the character of the Aperture Science facility, providing a deeper story for GLaDOS and Aperture's CEO Cave Johnson, as well as developing several concepts for "personality cores" ultimately to the creation of

SECTION 10

#1732798756990

1212-415: A mounted positional light gun . It allows two-player cooperative gameplay for the mission mode and features a deathmatch mode where two players compete against each other or up to four players compete in two teams. In 1992, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss was among the first to feature texture mapped environments, polygonal objects, and basic lighting. The engine was later enhanced for usage in

1313-485: A new wave of innovation. 1987 saw the release of MIDI Maze , an important transitional game for the genre. Unlike its contemporaries, MIDI Maze used raycasting to speedily draw square corridors. It also offered a networked multiplayer deathmatch (communicating via the computer's MIDI ports). Sublogic's Jet was a major release for the new platforms, as were Starglider and the tank simulator Arcticfox . In 1987, Taito's Operation Wolf arcade game started

1414-469: A number of "personality cores" that would fit onto GLaDOS to prevent her from turning against them. Despite this, on the day she was officially activated (coincidentally on " Take Your Daughter to Work Day "), she turned against the researchers and killed nearly everyone in the facility with lethal doses of neurotoxin gas. In the games and the comic Lab Rat , one employee Doug Rattmann survived due to his schizophrenia and distrust of GLaDOS. In trying to find

1515-518: A patch applied to the Steam version of Portal in March 2010, provided clues heralding the official announcement. The Potato Sack game, launched on April 1, 2011, led to the reveal of "GLaDOS@home", a spoof of distributed computer challenges, to get players to cooperate on playing the independent games as to unlock Portal 2 on Steam about 10 hours before its planned release. The Final Hours of Portal 2

1616-555: A portal, which flings them out of the other side to gain speed and distance that normal jumping and running could not generate. A leapfrogging effect can be used by placing portals in series during this flinging, gaining further momentum with each use. Portals will also allow light and other objects to transfer through them, and numerous puzzles involve using portals to manipulate bouncing energy balls, lasers, "hard light" bridges, and tractor beams to access new locations or direct objects to specific receptacles that must be activated to open

1717-472: A reactor failure, but inadvertently awakens GLaDOS, who had backed up her personality. Though they defeat GLaDOS by putting Wheatley in control of the facility, Wheatley is overwhelmed with power, sending Chell and GLaDOS, GLaDOS being temporarily reduced to a small computer powered by a potato, to the old core of Aperture, where GLaDOS rediscovers her relation to Caroline. They return to the surface where they are forced to defeat Wheatley before his ineptitude with

1818-424: A surface with a portal will cause the portals to dissipate. A critical feature of portals is that they retain the speed of the object traveling through it; as stated by GLaDOS to the player in the first game, "Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out". When portals are placed on non-parallel planes, this can create the effect of "flinging". Commonly, one uses gravity to build up their momentum when they fall into

1919-506: A track editor: Stunt Driver from Spectrum Holobyte (1990) and Stunts from Broderbund (1991). In 1990, SNK released beat 'em ups with a first-person perspective: the hack & slash game Crossed Swords , and the fighting & shooting game Super Spy . In 1991, Dactyl Nightmare appeared for the Virtuality arcade VR platform, which featured first person deathmatch style games with polygon player avatars. In late 1991,

2020-475: A way to defeat GLaDOS, he finds that Chell , one of the human subjects kept in cryogenic storage within Aperture, has a high level of tenacity, and arranges for the events of Portal to occur by moving her to the top of GLaDOS' testing list. GLaDOS remains driven to test human subjects despite the lack of humans. The player is introduced to Aperture in Portal , which is said by Valve to be set sometime between

2121-399: Is a compilation of both games and Still Alive content released for Nintendo Switch on June 28, 2022. The port was developed in collaboration with Nvidia Lightspeed Studios . The Potato Sack was an A.R.G ( alternate reality game ) conceived by Valve and 13 indie video game developers as a prelude to the release of Portal 2 . Portal 2 had been announced by a similar game, where

SECTION 20

#1732798756990

2222-493: Is a digital book written and created by Geoff Keighley released on May 17, 2011. This digital book gives insight on the creation of Portal 2 . Keighley had previously worked as an editor at GameSpot , writing several 10,000-word "Final Hours" pieces on various games where he visited the studios during the late development phases to document the creation of the game. One piece, "The Final Hours of Half-Life 2", allowed Keighley to interact with Valve during 2003 and 2004 and talk with

2323-515: Is a roomscale VR video game co-developed by Canadian studio Cloudhead Games and Valve, released free for Windows on June 25, 2019. It is a tech demo set in the Portal universe that showcases the functions of the hand, knuckle, and finger tracking technology used by the Valve Index . Aperture Desk Job is a free game set in the Portal universe released on March 1, 2022. It is a demonstration of

2424-473: Is a single-player mod for Portal 2 released on April 18, 2014, developed by Ruslan Rybka, also known as Stridemann, and released by SignHead Studio. Portal Reloaded is a 2021 single-player mod for Portal 2 developed by Jannis Brinkmann. Portal: Revolution is a 2024 single-player mod for Portal 2 developed by Second Face Software. It serves as a prequel to the original game. Mari0 is a fan-made video game released on March 3, 2012, that combines elements of

2525-422: Is an integral component of the gameplay. Although, like third-person shooters (TPS), the term has come to define a specific subgenre of shooter games rather than any using the perspective, with several shooter games, while belonging to other subgenres, using a first person perspective, such as, traditionally, light gun shooters , rail shooters , and shooting gallery games . Other genres that typically feature

2626-487: Is kept in indefinite suspended animation , but he is shot by a turret in the process. He then enters a stasis pod himself, leaving his fate afterward unknown. A board game version of Portal , developed by Cryptozoic Entertainment with oversight from Valve, was released in 2015. Titled Portal: Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game , the game is based on players manipulating their tokens – which are representative of unwitting test subjects – through various test chambers in

2727-439: Is not clear exactly when the earliest FPS video game was created. There are two claimants, Spasim and Maze War . The uncertainty about which was first stems from the lack of any accurate dates for the development of Maze War —even its developer cannot remember exactly. In contrast, the development of Spasim is much better documented and the dates are more certain. The initial development of Maze War probably occurred in

2828-455: Is not limited to physics, but designed to be modular so that other fields, such as fundamental electronics or chemistry, could be included. The "Teach with Portals" initiative is built atop of a stripped-down version of the Steam client, "Steam for Schools", that is designed to be used in schools, allowing instructors to control the installation of the games and lesson plans on the students' computers. These tools, as well as copies of Portal 2 and

2929-437: Is the first-person shooter (FPS), which allows player-guided navigation through a three-dimensional space. Electro-mechanical racing games had been using first-person perspectives since the late 1960s, dating back to Kasco's Indy 500 (1968) and Chicago Coin 's version Speedway (1969). The use of first-person perspectives in driving video games date back to Nürburgring 1 and Atari 's Night Driver in 1976. It

3030-545: Is uniquely tenacious among the test subjects held by Aperture, Rattmann moves her to the top of the queue of testing subjects, thus starting the events of the first Portal . After Chell defeats GLaDOS, Rattmann escapes Aperture, but returns against the Companion Cube's objections when he sees the Party Escort Bot dragging an unconscious Chell back inside and into a disabled cryo chamber. He ensures that Chell

3131-492: The Half-Life series) for government funding. Johnson acquired the rights to a disused salt mine in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where they started building a labyrinthine set of offices, laboratories, facilities, and test chambers. During this time, Johnson became poisoned from exposure to moon dust, a key component of the paint needed to support portal technology, and became increasingly deranged. In Portal 2 ,

Portal (series) - Misplaced Pages Continue

3232-575: The dual analog stick controls that have become the norm. Take Your Daughter to Work Day Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day , sometimes termed Take Your Child to Work Day , is a national day that gives children in the United States a glimpse into the working world. Developed by the Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization,

3333-620: The 1990s: Wing Commander and X-Wing . Atari 's 1983 Star Wars arcade game leaned entirely on action rather than tactics, but offered 3D color vector renderings of TIE Fighters and the surface of the Death Star . Other shooters with a first-person view from the early 1980s include Taito's Space Seeker in 1981, Horizon V for the Apple II the same year, Sega's stereoscopic arcade game SubRoc-3D in 1982, Novagen Software s Encounter in 1983, and EA's Skyfox for

3434-399: The Aperture Laboratories. The goal being to test the most lucrative chambers while attempting to stall the progress of other players. Valve had approached Cryptozoic with the core concepts of the board game, which the publisher found only needed small modifications in gameplay for the purpose of balance. The Lab is a VR game developed by Valve that as part of its partnership with HTC and

3535-475: The Aperture systems causes the facility reactors to become critical and explode. GLaDOS is returned to her original place and returns the facility to normal. GLaDOS then lets Chell go, realizing that the prospect of trying to kill her is too much trouble. Instead, she turns to two robots of her own creation, Atlas and P-Body, to locate a mythical store of additional human subjects kept in cryogenic sleep for her to continue testing on. In addition to these characters,

3636-414: The Apple II in 1984. Flight simulators were a first-person staple for home computers beginning in 1979 with FS1 Flight Simulator from Sublogic and followed up with Flight Simulator II in 1983. MicroProse found a niche with first-person aerial combat games: Hellcat Ace (1982), Spitfire Ace (1982), and F-15 Strike Eagle (1985). Amidst a flurry of faux-3D first-person maze games where

3737-540: The Companion Cube is a sentient object and a key to her survival, before having Chell dispose of it in an incinerator in order to leave a test chamber. Both games feature other personality cores that were constructed to keep GLaDOS in check; the first game includes three cores, the Morality, Curiosity, and Intelligence Cores, voiced by McLain as well as a snarling Anger Core voiced by Mike Patton . In Portal 2 , three more such cores (beyond Wheatley) are introduced including

3838-507: The Exidy arcade game Star Fire and Doug Neubauer 's seminal Star Raiders for Atari 8-bit computers . The popularity of Star Raiders resulted in similarly styled games from other developers and for other systems, including Starmaster for the Atari 2600, Space Spartans for Intellivision, and Shadow Hawk One for the Apple II. It went on to influence two major first-person games of

3939-534: The GLaDOS voice. Portal 2 also features the song " Exile Vilify " by The National . The concept of Portal came from Narbacular Drop , a student project from the DigiPen Institute of Technology . The game included the aspects of placing portals on any flat surfaces and using them to maneuver around levels. Valve's employees, attending a DigiPen career fair, saw their game and shortly later offered

4040-472: The Puzzle Maker, are being offered for free for all educators. First-person (video games) First-person can be used as sole perspective in games belonging of almost any genre ; first-person party-based RPGs and first-person maze games helped define the format throughout the 1980s, while first-person shooters (FPS) are a popular genre emerging in the 1990s in which the graphical perspective

4141-544: The Steam Workshop to others. Further on this, Valve has created a special version of the Portal level editor to be used alongside its "Steam in Schools" program as a means of using the game and editor to teach students about physics, math, and other lessons; Valve released this version of Portal 2 free for educational use. Exploring options for a full-scale VR game in 2017, Valve experimented with Portal , but found

Portal (series) - Misplaced Pages Continue

4242-481: The Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work program was turned over to Carolyn McKecuen , a MacArthur Award recipient, who took effective control as its executive director before relocating to Elizabeth City, North Carolina , where it has remained since. Gloria Steinem continues to maintain a role with the Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Foundation as a member of its board of directors. Employees across

4343-581: The United States and around the world typically invite their own children or relatives to join them at work, but the program particularly encourages employees to invite children from residential programs or shelters who may not be exposed to many adults in skilled professions today. Company employee resource groups (ERGs) , such as a Women in the workforce ERG or Working parents ERG, tend to sponsor "Take Our Children to Work Day" programming. In 2019, working mother advocate and Entrepreneur writer Christine Michel Carter listed three implementation benefits for

4444-536: The VR headset, the HTC Vive . It was described as a "room-scale" VR experience, consisting of about a dozen small experimental experiences that highlight the use of VR; such include experiencing a fully panoramic view that has been stitched together from a number of photographs, a physics game where the player attempts to launch personality cores into piles of boxes using a catapult, and a bow-and-arrow based game. The Lab

4545-471: The Wheatley core character. Portal 2 was similarly released with high praise with a 95 out of 100 score on Metacritic. Valve has continued to support the game through the release of two separate downloadable content packages, one introducing a new co-operative campaign, and a second that incorporated an easy-to-learn level editor that allowed players to make their own test chambers and share these through

4646-708: The avatar to block the player's view, but the absence of an avatar can make it difficult to master the timing and distances required to jump between platforms, and may cause motion sickness in some players. Players have come to expect first-person games to accurately scale objects to appropriate sizes, although the key objects such as dropped items or levers may be exaggerated in order to improve their visibility. First-person perspectives are used in various different genres, including several distinct sub-genres of shooter games . Shooting gallery games , which evolved from early-21st-century electro-mechanical games and in turn late-20th-century carnival games , typically employ

4747-409: The core of GLaDOS (also McLain). Sometime after Johnson's death, the old sections of the facility were vitrified , and a more modern facility was built atop the ruins. GLaDOS was built to control the facility and monitor the tests, but researchers found that the computer had villainous tendencies, threatening to kill the entire staff before it was shut down in time. The Aperture researchers constructed

4848-404: The country, in addition to participants in over 200 countries around the world, to plan ahead for the annual event. The day has generally been scheduled on a day that is a school day for most children in the United States, and schools are provided with literature and encouraged to promote the program. Educators are provided with materials for incorporating career exploration into school curricula on

4949-451: The creation of the new content and what new features players could expect in the future from Portal 2 . To help the players develop the fictional history of Aperture Science, Valve created a digital comic to tell the story of the "Rat Man", a schizophrenic who is unseen in the games themselves but creates murals and scrawlings that guide Chell in both games. The comic, "Portal 2: Lab Rat", takes place both during and after Portal , explaining

5050-742: The day before or after the event. The program was officially expanded in 2003 to include boys ; however, most companies that participated in the program had, since the beginning, allowed both boys and girls to participate, usually renaming it "Take Our Children to Work Day" or an equivalent. The program's official website states that the program was changed in order to provide both boys and girls with opportunities to explore careers at an age when they are more flexible in terms of gender roles . The Ms. Foundation also states that men who have hosted children have benefited from being seen as parental figures in addition to their roles as professionals, which can contribute to combating gender stereotypes as well. Prior to

5151-521: The day revolves around parents taking their children to work to expose students to future job possibilities and the value of education. It is the successor to Take Our Daughters to Work Day , which was expanded to include boys in 2003. In the U.S., it occurs on the fourth Thursday in April every year. The most recent Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Day occurred on Thursday, April 25, 2024. In 2018, more than 37 million Americans at over 3.5 million workplaces participated. Take Our Daughters to Work Day

SECTION 50

#1732798756990

5252-666: The day. Judy Hargadon, an NHS CEO, who had been in the States as a Harkness Fellow in 1993 and had taken her 10-year old daughter to the TODTW event that year, was appointed Chair of TODTW UK. Raina Sheridan of OPM was the charity's Project Director and later became Chair. A number of businesses across the UK gave supported the charity including Helene Curtis, BT, Body Shop and the Gatsby Trust, as well as OPM. Many other organizations across

5353-618: The employer: worker satisfaction, increased productivity, and employee retention. Take Our Daughters to Work Day UK (TODTW UK), was established as a charity in 1994, one year after the first event in the US. Having worked in New York with Nell Merlino, the creator of the concept, Greg Parston, Chief Executive of the Office for Public Management (OPM) in London, offered OPM as the initial organizer of

5454-471: The entire team jobs at Valve to help expand on their idea. Valve originally saw Portal as an experimental game to be included with its upcoming compilation, The Orange Box , alongside its release of Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2 . To give the game character, a minimal story, tied loosely with the Half-Life world, was written by Valve's Erik Wolpaw . He needed a character to guide

5555-415: The events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2 . The player-character Chell is awakened by GLaDOS for testing. Chell resists GLaDOS' lies and verbal ploys and succeeds to defeat GLaDOS' core, the destruction creating a portal implosion that sends Chell to the surface, unconscious. Rattmann, who has helped Chell by writing warning messages and directions to maintenance areas on the facility walls and had observed

5656-444: The events that led to Portal 2 . The Rat Man's artwork appears early in Portal 2 , where it retells the plot of Portal . Michael Avon Oeming , who had worked on comics for Valve games Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead , and Valve in-house artist Andrea Wicklund drew the comic. Ted Kosmatka wrote most of the story with input from the Portal 2 writers. The 27-page comic was made available online in two parts about two weeks before

5757-560: The final battle, escapes Aperture, but on witnessing a robot dragging Chell's body back inside, sacrifices his escape to assure that Chell is put into indefinite cryogenic storage. He himself is critically wounded but appears to make it to another cryogenic chamber, though his ultimate fate is not revealed. Portal 2 takes place an unknown number of years after the events of the first game; the Aperture facility has fallen into disrepair without GLaDOS. A personality core named Wheatley ( Stephen Merchant ) wakes Chell from her sleep to help her stop

5858-400: The fledgling id Software released Catacomb 3D , which introduced the concept of showing the player's hand on-screen, strengthening the illusion that the player is viewing the world through the character's eyes. Taito's Gun Buster was released in arcades in 1992. It features on-foot gameplay and a control scheme where the player moves using an eight-direction joystick and aims using

5959-401: The game displays what the player's avatar would see with the avatar's own eyes. Thus, players typically in many games they cannot see the avatar's body, though they may be able to see the avatar's weapons or hands. This viewpoint is also frequently used to represent the perspective of a driver within a vehicle, as in flight and racing simulators; it is common to make use of positional audio, where

6060-417: The game includes numerous laser-seeking turrets that seek to kill the player-characters, though are apologetic for it; most are voiced by McLain, though some defective ones in the sequel are voiced by Nolan North . GLaDOS introduces Chell to the " Weighted Companion Cube ", appearing similar to other Weighed Cubes (crates) in the game, but decorated with hearts on its sides; GLaDOS attempts to make Chell believe

6161-467: The game was responsible for the word's subsequent entry into the video gaming lexicon. Doom has been considered the most important first-person shooter ever made. The 1995 game Descent used a fully 3D polygonal graphics engine to render opponents, departing from the sprites used by most previous games in the FPS genre. It also escaped the "pure vertical walls" graphical restrictions of earlier games in

SECTION 60

#1732798756990

6262-596: The game's release and was also bundled with the game itself. Dark Horse Comics has published "Portal 2: Lab Rat" in a printed anthology of Valve comics, Valve Presents: The Sacrifice and Other Steam-Powered Stories , in November 2011. In the comic, Doug Rattmann (also known as The Rat Man) is a scientist working in the Aperture facility. He escapes GLaDOS's initial neurotoxin attack, but suffers symptoms as his schizophrenia medication runs out, causing hallucinations of his Weighted Companion Cube talking. Noticing that Chell

6363-560: The games Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds and System Shock . Later in 1992, id improved the technology used in Catacomb 3D by adding support for VGA graphics in Wolfenstein 3D . It would be widely imitated in the years to follow, and marked the beginning of many conventions in the genre, including collecting different weapons that can be switched between using the keyboard's number keys, and ammo conservation. 1996 saw

6464-449: The games, and several of the game elements have become parts of internet memes . Both Portal games take place in the fictional "Aperture Science Enrichment Center". Aperture Science was founded by Cave Johnson (voiced by J.K. Simmons ) and originally sought to make shower curtains for the military. Its research happened upon the discovery of portal technology, and soon became a direct competitor with Black Mesa Research Facility (from

6565-493: The genre, and allowed the player six degrees of freedom of movement (up/down, left/right, forward/backward, pitch, roll, and yaw ). The Quake series since 1996, and derived titles such as 1998's Half-Life , advanced from Doom with a fully 3D engine allowing players to look from any angle, and helped formalize the mouse and WASD keys combo that has become the standard means of control on personal computers. On consoles meanwhile, games like Halo from 2001, helped define

6666-534: The idea of solving puzzles through scientific concepts, but eliminating the use of portals altogether; these versions did not fare well with test audiences nor with Gabe Newell, Valve's president; these ideas were dropped though saved for potential reuse in a different game by Valve. Portal 2 development was restarted specifically to keep the portal concept but adding new elements to freshen the gameplay. During this period, Valve had witnessed another student project out of Digipen, Tag: The Power of Paint which allows

6767-457: The inclusion of boys, the Ms. Foundation contended that the program was designed to specifically address self-esteem issues unique to girls and initially resisted pressure to include boys. Much of this pressure came from educators who did not wish to include the event in their curriculum because their male students were not encouraged to participate. In 2007, upon becoming its own separate foundation,

6868-418: The irrelevant Fact Core, the bold Adventure Core, and the space-obsessed Space Core, each voiced by North. The player controls the main character (Chell in both single player campaigns, or Atlas and P-Body in the cooperative campaign) from a first-person view, running, jumping, and interacting with switches or other devices. The player-characters are able to withstand large drops, but can be killed by falling in

6969-450: The late 1980s, interest in 3D first-person driving simulations resulted in games like Test Drive (1987) and Vette! (1989). 1989's Hard Drivin' arcade game from Atari Games was particularly influential, with fast filled-polygon graphics, a mathematical model of how the vehicle components interact, force feedback, and instant replay after crashes. In the following years, two Hard Drivin' -esque MS-DOS games appeared, each including

7070-523: The level's exit. Portal 2 introduces "mobility gels" that can paint surfaces, including turrets and cubes, that can also move through portals though not directly by the player. The gels can create a surface that repels the player (Repulsion Gel), increases the player's speed (Propulsion Gel), or allows the surface to accept portals (Conversion Gel). The games' credit sequences feature the songs " Still Alive " and " Want You Gone " composed by Jonathan Coulton , and, in its original form, sung by Ellen McLain in

7171-434: The monsters and other players, with the walls rendered as vector lines. Set in A.D. 2020, Futurewar anticipated Doom , although as to Castle Wolfenstein ' s transition to a futuristic theme, the common PLATO genesis is coincidental. A further PLATO FPS was the tank game Panther , introduced in 1975, generally acknowledged as a precursor to Battlezone . 1979 saw the release of two first-person space combat games:

7272-455: The player explores these long-abandoned areas of Aperture, learning that the company had moved from testing on the country's finest, to paid volunteers, who were often homeless, and ultimately to forcing its own employees to participate in testing. Near the point of his death, Johnson ordered his lifelong assistant Caroline (voiced by Ellen McLain ) to be the first test subject for a mind-to-computer transfer ; her personality would ultimately form

7373-472: The player is locked into one of four orientations, like Spectre , Muse Software 's Escape! , Tunnel Runner , Escape from the Mindmaster , 3D Monster Maze , 3-D Monster Chase , 3-Demon , Phantom Slayer , and Dungeons of Daggorath , came the 1982 release of Paul Edelstein's Wayout from Sirius Software. Not a shooter, it has smooth, arbitrary movement using what was later labeled

7474-492: The player through the game, coming onto a polite but humorous artificial intelligence, which would ultimately become the character of GLaDOS . Portal ' s release with The Orange Box received near-universal praise, with the standalone game earning an aggregate Metacritic rating of 90 out of 100. With success of the game, work on an expanded sequel began nearly immediately, expanding the development team from 8 to about 30-40 programmers. Initial ideas for Portal 2 retained

7575-467: The player to spray paint onto surfaces to alter their behavior, and brought them into Valve, though not initially as part of the Portal . The Tag team had found a way to incorporate their paints with real-time fluid dynamics code previously made by Valve, and soon their concept for paints had become the "conversion gels" as part of Portal 2 . Valve included a co-operative play mode, based on their own observations and stories from players about working out

7676-518: The player's character could climb upon), more intricate level design ( Wolfenstein 3D was limited to a grid based system where walls had to be orthogonal to each other, whereas Doom allowed for any inclination) and rudimentary illumination effects such as flickering lights and areas of darkness, creating a far more believable 3D environment than Wolfenstein 3D 's levels, all of which had a flat-floor space and corridors. Doom allowed competitive matches between multiple players, termed deathmatches , and

7777-528: The player's goal to reach the exit. The Portal games are noted for bringing students and their projects from the DigiPen Institute of Technology into Valve and extending their ideas into the full games. The portal concept was introduced by the game Narbacular Drop and led to the basis for the first game. Another game, Tag: The Power of Paint , formed the basis of surface-altering "gels" introduced in Portal 2 . Both games have received near-universal praise, and have sold millions of copies. The first game

7878-440: The portal systems disorienting in VR; instead, they returned to the Half-Life series and released Half-Life: Alyx in 2020. In April 2022, Erik Wolpaw urged Valve to make Portal 3 saying "I am also not getting any younger. We are reaching the point where – it's crazy to think – [we're] literally going to be too old to work on Portal 3 . So we should just do it." In September, Ellen McLain also called for Portal 3 saying she

7979-587: The public, private and charitable sectors provided hosting opportunities, including the BBC, the NHS, John Laing, ScotRail, NatWest, ICI and the London Fire Brigade.   In 1997, the charity was renamed Our Daughters and Sons Charitable Trust, with the objective 'to carry on the business of promoting public education and to provide and develop education opportunities within the workplace'. The change enabled

8080-446: The release of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall for MS-DOS by Bethesda Softworks , featuring similar graphics and polygonal structures to other games at the time and furthering the first-person element included in 1994's The Elder Scrolls: Arena , to which it was a sequel. Doom (1993) refined Wolfenstein 3D's template by adding support for higher resolution, improved textures, variations in height (e.g., stairs and platforms

8181-563: The response to these efforts was praised by educators. Their efforts culminated in a "Teach with Portals" program that Newell announced at the Festival. The effort is built on a standalone "Puzzle Maker" that incorporates the level editor for Portal 2 that was released as free content for the game in early 2012. Valve had built the Puzzle Maker with the aid of educators, as to make it suitable for lesson plans as well as making it as easy for teachers to use to construct such plans. The Puzzle Maker

8282-422: The rest of the content of The Orange Box as a "safety net". Portal has since been repackaged on Windows as a standalone game in April 2008. A Mac OS X client was introduced simultaneously with the release of the Steam client for that platform in May 2010; as part of its promotion, the game was released free of charge for both platforms during which at least 1.5 million players downloaded it. Portal: Still Alive

8383-413: The same year. The game is a rudimentary space flight simulation game with a first-person 3D wireframe view. It allowed online multiplayer over the worldwide university-based PLATO network . Futurewar (1976) by high-school student Erik K. Witz and Nick Boland, also based on PLATO, is sometimes claimed to be the first true FPS. The game includes a bitmap image of a gun and other armaments that point at

8484-713: The scheme in the UK. The Day's objectives were to promote the equality of women with men by the advancement of public education in the role of women at work, to expand opportunities for women at work and to advocate the value of women in the workplace, as well as to advance the education of both girls and boys about the opportunities for employment available to them. The focus of the Day was to build confidence and to encourage girls to think more about their work options and not to limit their choices in their early years at secondary school. TODTWD UK also produced packs with special educational activities for boys, when girls were out of school for

8585-558: The solutions to Portal ' s puzzles in a group environment. With this feature, they sought the ability to enable cross-platform play of Portal 2 between computers and consoles through Steamworks. This led to a surprise reveal by Newell that not only would Portal 2 be on the PlayStation 3 platform, after previously stating the difficulties in supporting this console, but that it would include support for cross-platform play between personal computers and PlayStation 3 players through

8686-496: The staff as they completed work on Half-Life 2 . Keighley wanted to recreate a similar work for Portal 2 , with focus on making it an interactive work for the iPad . Keighley was granted "fly on the wall" access to Valve when Portal 2 was being produced. The initial iPad release was written by Keighley with work by Joe Zeff Design, a studio that had also produced digital applications for Time magazine. The interactive work provides movie clips and short applications to demonstrate

8787-563: The student proceeds. At least one college, Wabash College , introduced Portal as part of required coursework; at Wabash, the game is used as an example of Erving Goffman 's dissemination on dramaturgy , The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . At a mid-2011 presentation at the 2011 Games for Change Festival at New York University , Gabe Newell stated Valve's intention to direct Portal and Portal 2 towards education. Newell stated that Valve "doesn't see divide between making

8888-465: The summer of 1973. A single player traverses a maze of corridors rendered using fixed perspective. Multiplayer capabilities, with players attempting to shoot each other, were probably added later in 1973 (two machines linked via a serial connection) and in the summer of 1974 (fully networked). Spasim was originally developed in the spring of 1974 with a documented debut at the University of Illinois

8989-571: The tests involve using the "Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device" – nicknamed the portal gun – that creates a human-sized wormhole-like connection between two flat surfaces. The player-character or objects in the game world may move through portals while conserving their momentum. This allows complex "flinging" maneuvers to be used to cross wide gaps or perform other feats to reach the exit for each test chamber. A number of other mechanics, such as lasers, light bridges, high energy pellets , buttons, cubes, tractor funnels and turrets, exist to aid or hinder

9090-418: The toxic water of the facility, crushed to death, passing through laser grids, or fired on repeatedly by turrets. Both games are generally divided into a series of test chambers; other sections of the game are more exploratory areas that connect these chambers. Each chamber has an exit door that must be reached, often requiring that certain conditions have been met such as having weighed down a large button with

9191-435: The trend of realistic military-themed action shooters, and featured side-scrolling environments and high-quality graphics for the time. It was followed the subsequent year by a sequel, titled Operation Thunderbolt , that introduced a pseudo-3D perspective and the illusion of depth. The success and popularity of these two games led to Sega releasing Line of Fire in 1989, another military combat arcade machine that achieved

9292-603: The various features of the Steam Deck handheld system. In the game, the player works as a quality assurance checker for toilets manufactured by Aperture Science in its early years. They are guided by the personality core Grady through the steps, but as the game progresses, mishaps in the automated factory lead Grady to suggest that the player develop a weaponized toilet as an invention to pitch to Cave Johnson. In February 2013, Valve president Gabe Newell and film director J. J. Abrams announced that they were to collaborate on

9393-412: The various mechanics of the game and stages of the game's development. The work was later ported into a non-interactive eBook, and into an application with the same iPad interactivity on the Steam platform. With the iPad and Steam version, Keighley is able to offer live updates to the work; upon release of the "Peer Review" downloadable content pack, the work was updated with an additional chapter discussing

9494-496: The video games Super Mario Bros. and Portal . In August 2011, Dan Trachtenberg released a fan film based on the series called Portal: No Escape . The video would later go viral. The Portal games have found application in educational aspects outside of game development. The first game was praised as an example of instructional scaffolding where the student is first given an environment to learn new tools with sufficient hand-holding, but these facets are slowly removed as

9595-404: The volume of ambient sounds varies depending on their position with respect to the player's avatar. Games with a first-person perspective do not require sophisticated animations for the player's avatar, nor do they need to implement a manual or automated camera-control scheme as in third-person perspective. A first-person perspective allows for easier aiming, since there is no representation of

9696-629: Was a standalone version of Portal with additional content for the Xbox Live Arcade , released in October 2008. The game included new achievements, additional challenges from the existing test chambers, and additional non-story levels based on those found in the Flash -based Portal: The Flash Version created by We Create Stuff. In September 2022, Nvidia announced it would release an updated version of Portal with real-time ray tracing , as

9797-462: Was announced at the 2016 Game Developers Conference , and was released free on April 5, 2016, following the public release of the HTC Vive. Valve licensed the use of Portal to Headup Games and Clockstone Software, the developers of Bridge Constructor , to develop Bridge Constructor Portal . The game follows the same type of gameplay as Bridge Constructor , where players are tasked to create

9898-607: Was created in New York City in the summer of 1992 by the Ms. Foundation for Women and its president, Marie C. Wilson , the Women's foundation treasurer, Daren Ball, and with support from foundation founder Gloria Steinem . The first celebration took place on March 26, 1993, and has since been celebrated usually on the fourth Thursday of April in order for the 37 million children, parents, schools in over 3.5 million workplaces across

9999-658: Was released as part of a five-game compilation, The Orange Box , and though intended as a short bonus feature of the compilation, was instead considered the highlight of the five. Its success led to the creation of the much longer Portal 2 , which included both single player and cooperative player modes; it too received near-universal critical acclaim. In addition to the challenging puzzle elements, both games are praised for their dark humor , written by Erik Wolpaw , Chet Faliszek , and Jay Pinkerton , voice work by actors Ellen McLain , Stephen Merchant , and J. K. Simmons . A number of spin-off media have been developed alongside

10100-513: Was released in 2023. Portal Stories: Mel is a single-player mod of Portal 2 released on June 25, 2015, developed by Prism Studios . Portal Stories: VR is a single-player virtual reality fangame of Portal 2 released on May 16, 2016, developed by Prism Studios . Aperture Tag: The Paint Gun Testing Initiative is a 2014 first-person puzzle-platform video game developed by the Aperture Tag Team. Thinking with Time Machine

10201-442: Was willing to star in it and asked fans to "write in. Email Valve. You've got my blessing". Portal was initially released in October 2007 as part of a compilation game called The Orange Box , alongside Half-Life 2 and its two episodes and Team Fortress 2 . Valve considered including Portal as a bonus feature of the compilation; the game was purposely kept short such that if it did not meet expectations, players would have

#989010