Valve ARG suggests GlaDOS is still alive
Man I love Valve. I mean besides creating one of the best online ecosystems available to gamers in Steam, offering up arguably the best value for gaming maybe ever in Orange Box, and gracing the world with one of, if not the, most unique, entertaining, and challenging puzzle games ever in Portal, they just seem like really, really fun dudes. Take a look at last year’s promo material for the launch of Steam on OSX, particularly the Half Life 2 release. It’s that kind of tongue-in-cheek satirical slant Valve seems to take with everything they do that makes them feel like the kind of company I wish I could hang out and have a beer with.
So this morning when I stumbled across this ARG puzzle game only to discover the complete image was a Bathysphere that looks strikingly like the personality cores you had to destroy in order to defeat GlaDOS at the end of Portal, it filled me with a mad case of the lulz.
The puzzle is composed of 9 colour-inverted tiles, each named with a nonsensical anagram of “Reboot Process.” The tiles were dropped on several pertinent sites, including MacRumors.com, reminding users that Portal 2 will be available for both OSX and Windows on launch. Perhaps most brilliant of all, the tiles also contain strings of code which, when inverted (subtracted from 255, the number of characters in the ASCII ISO Latin-1 table), form what appears to be jerky, stumbling computer-generated dialogue that reminds one of a certain megalomaniacal computer scientist we all know.
As far as I can tell, the tiles were dropped on the sites early on Friday April 8, possibly as early as Midnight. As of 4:18 AM, the time of this posting on Cult of Mac, the puzzle was 8/9ths solved. Even given that ARG puzzles are fairly commonplace these days and can be spotted a mile away, the speed with which this one was solved, especially considering the complexity of the hidden ASCII message, has me thinking that for Valve, this is a triumph. I’m making a note here…huge success.
Portal 2 comes online on April 19. I think it will do exceedingly well. For science.
