Some days, some stories are just too weird to know what’s going on.  This is one of them.

Several years ago, as I’m sure most of you reading these words know, Valve released a little game called Portal, one of three titles in the so-called “Orange Box” three-pack (the others being Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 1).  Though all three games in the multipack have gone on to become favorites, it is arguably Portal, probably the shortest and least-hyped of the lot, that has achieved the highest standing in the hearts and minds of gamers worldwide.  Its unique blend of FPS controls with mind-bending, tricky platforming and puzzle-solving was a hit, as was the game’s darkly comic atmosphere and the sarcastic, increasingly sinister “pep talks” given you by the game’s narrator and de facto antagonist, the feindish AI known as “GLaDOS.”  Portal also gave us the expression “The Cake is a Lie,” the great Jonathan Coulton song “Still Alive,” and of course the tragic saga of the ever-loyal Weighted Companion Cube.  It’s no exaggeration to say it’s absolutely a modern classic of gaming.

It is, however, a game that is rapidly approaching its third birthday.  And no matter how popular or respected a game is, three years is an eternity in the fast-moving gaming industry; it’s about twice what the half-life is (no pun intended) for a typical commercial game to receive official support from its parent company.  Unless it’s something like an MMO, most publishers simply don’t have the time or resources necessary to continue releasing patches for the older games in their catalog, not when there’s always a new game in the works.

On Monday, a patch was released for Portal, unannounced and without warning, via Valve’s Steam content-delivery platform.  And the nature of that patch, and exactly what it did to the game, has got the entire Internet in a mild uproar over exactly what’s cooking over at Valve.

After this patch is downloaded and applied, at first nothing seems different in the game at all.  It adds no new levels or content, as far as can be seen.  However, sharp-eyed players may notice that, when a new game is started, the radio in the starting chamber now has a green light instead of amber.  What’s more, if you decide to take the radio out with you and carry it through the test chamber, you’ll notice that in certain places it gives off a strange staticy noise (instead of the usual “party” instrumental of “Still Alive” that all the radios in the game play).  This is the key to unlocking a new mystery achievement, which is to find all the radios in-game and take them to where they play static.  There also appears to be a new and slightly amended ending — which I won’t spoil here, except to say that it makes things just a wee bit more open-ended.

However, it is the static itself that is the interesting thing here.  Follow the bouncing ball on this one, friends:

The “static” is in fact encrypted data, using a transmission protocol (SSTV) very similar to how data is encoded and sent over telephone lines.  When the static is recorded as an audio file (or, if you’re sneaky, you can simply find the WAV files in your Portal directory) and run through a program designed to decode SSTV signals, you get a series of files:  Audio snippets, Morse code messages, or a collection of indistinct, out of focus images.  These images contain certain numeric clues that, when strung together, produce an MD5 sum.  When run through an MD5 program, it gives you a telephone number; this is for an old-school, landline BBS system, from where more clues and strange evidence — including ANSI/ASCII representations of classic Portal and Half-Life imagery, as well as some incriminating documents regarding the goings-on at the infamous Aperture Laboratories — await your discerning eye.

What does it all mean?  Portal 2?  The long-awaited Half-Life 3?  Or is Valve just enjoying an early and elaborate April Fool’s gag on their established fanbase, using Steam to do it?  At this point, your guess is as good as anyone’s, and theories are still flying fast and furious as to exactly what in the Samuel Coleridge Taylor HELL is going on here.

But no matter what the truth is, you have to tip your hats to Valve for an extremely inventive and fascinating “meta-game” that is almost as much fun as the actual game itself.

In other words:  “This was a triumph…  I’m making a note here, ‘HUGE SUCCESS’…”

Related posts:

1. The Orange Box Review
2. Half-Life On Sale for 98 Cents
3. Through the Dark Portal: A Look at the Burning Crusade
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