Something’s Up with Valve’s Portal…

I have a confession to make. You know the game “Portal”, from Valve? Yeah, that one. Well, I have never as much as loaded up the main screen. IThat’s right… I’ve not only never beaten Portal, but I’ve never played it, either. But before you start throwing rocks, calm down, because current goings-on from Valve surrounding the game are beginning to make me highly regret never playing it before.

Trust me, it’s true. Valve has always been an innovative company, and its titles are always well worth getting excited over. But when it came to Portal, I just had no interest. I admit that part of this reason was due to the fact that I didn’t like the major shift in direction Team Fortress 2 took (it’s nothing like the original), and as petty as that may be, I just couldn’t muster the desire to try anything except Episode Two, which was also new at the time.

But, earlier this week, Valve launched an update for Portal, which I’m sure must have thrown a few people off guard. It’s typical that Valve releases updates for older games, for compatibility reasons, but thankfully there was much more to this update. Introduced into the game was a new achievement, and a lot of secrets. If you place a radio over a red button, it begins spitting out Morse code. And as it appears now, there’s quite a bit of Morse code here to be had.

There have been some translations of this code, and here’s a good one:

Interior transmission active
External data line active
Message digest active
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
System data dump active
User back up active
Password back up active
Beep beep beep beep lol

Props to Valve for putting something as iconic as “The quick brown…” in there. One thing’s that’s clear is that something is en route, whether it be a Portal expansion pack, Portal 2, HL2 Episode Three… who knows? It’s all up to speculation right now, but given that the message pretty well talks about a “backup”, it seems like something is bound to be “rebooted”. Wee… this is interesting, and undeniably brilliant marketing.

One thing’s for sure, next time I game, I need to load up Portal…