The Removed & Lost Easter Eggs of Portal 2

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Hey everyone, the name’s Ossy Flawol. Easter eggs in Valve’s games are possibly some of the most talked about, with every Valve game at least having something secret to find. When it comes to Portal 2 specifically, there’s a case to be made that it is the Valve game with the most amount of officially made Easter eggs. From the Rattman Dens to the developer in-joke of Hoopy, to the Borealis Drydock and the secret Companion Cube in co-op, there’s tons to find in this game. In fact, if you’re watching this video, you may have also watched GLoWhNo’s video discussing some Portal 2 Easter eggs, primarily focused on the softlock prevention dialogue from GLaDOS. This video got me thinking: GLoWhNo described these dialogue pieces as being "forgotten Easter Eggs", certainly weren’t things I had forgotten but were clearly things that most new Portal fans wouldn’t be familiar with. The whole idea and prospect made me think: can we go a level beyond simply Easter eggs that fell out of the public consciousness? A layer beyond what we can find in the retail, final version of the game? What if we delved into the murky depths below the surface, and entered the realm… of scrapped content? What could we find out about the Easter eggs that didn’t make it into the final cut of Portal 2? That’s right, we’re going into scrapped Easter eggs, a level beyond just secrets hidden in the game world, these are secrets that Valve straight up did not finish or ended up replacing. For whatever reason, they would end up forgotten on the cutting room floor, forever, never to see the light of day. And to start us off, let’s talk about something I’ve been promising to explain: a scrapped Easter egg involving a certain aquarium-loving orb. Do you remember this sequence? (loud crashing) (Wheatley) Sorry, sorry! My fault! Butterfingers! (GLaDOS) Either way, I get the impression he's about to kill us. (Wheatley) Carry on! (Ossy) This is a destruction sequence seen in Chapter 8 of Portal 2, featured on the map sp_a4_jump_polarity, which is the final "proper" Test Chamber of the entire game. As you just saw, Wheatley breaks a hallway, and then a Frankenturret pops through only to be squished as a huge gel tanker blasts Conversion Gel to let you cross the gap. This entire sequence is controlled by a logic_relay entity. These entities are used for organisational purposes, where instead of a mapper needing to make a trigger fire inputs into dozens of entities at once, they can just point the trigger at a logic_relay that has all the entity inputs set, for organisation purposes, of course. However, right next to this relay is… exactly the same relay? What appears to have happened here is that Valve originally made this destruction sequence in the base map file, but then chose to take it and shove it into what we call an instance. Instances are essentially a way to nest VMF files within other VMF files, and they have a wide variety of use cases. In this case specifically, it seems this was done for either organisational purposes or to allow rapid prototyping of the scene, given this was all made in the final months of development during the intense crunch. It seems like when Valve put the instance in the map, they deleted everything of the original scene but left this original relay intact. This leads to a beta phenomenon we call “Dead I/O”, where a piece of map logic has no valid inputs or outputs and is left to simply take up space. This dead piece of logic is for an early version of the destruction sequence, and it actually tries to fire inputs to dozens of entities that don’t exist. The more astute mappers may notice these entities actually do exist in the map, they’ve just been given the instance prefix due to how compiling with instances works in the Source Engine. But the more important thing is that this early piece of logic does not have the Frankenturret anywhere in it. It has a Personality Core. It has the Aquarium Core. This early logic attempts to fire several outputs involving a sequence where the Aquarium Core would appear as a part of the junk falling through. The Aquarium Core entity here is labelled as “core1”, and by reading through this relay, we can see what it was meant to do. The Frankenturret in the final sequence is actually still named “core1”, indicating a direct replacement happened here. The Frankenturret is also set to use skin 1, which does not exist on their models, indicating it’s a remnant from when this was the Aquarium Core. This therefore would’ve meant it showed up with… a red eye. For the record by the way, Valve did not care about core eye colours, as every personality core character besides Wheatley in development had red eyes at some point. Just, throwing that tidbit out there because most people associate Aquarium with the yellowish green texture in the files. Anyways, let’s see exactly what Aquarium was meant to do here via that leftover relay. First, the Aquarium Core is told to start scripting, shortly afterwards, it wakes up, and proceeds to detach from its parent object, which is followed up by a SetParent input of nothing to clear the parent field. The Aquarium Core is then ungagged, allowing it to speak, and then turns on its Flashlight as it plays an ambient_generic entity called “AquariumPlay”. The Aquarium Core is then, after some time, killed as it goes offscreen. One of the first things I did after finding this out was immediately try restore it. I hooked up all the entities in the scene to their original names, replaced the Frankenturret with a Core being held by a pincer claw, as the scene also calls for a pincer, aaaaand.. (soft thud) (loud crashing) Yeah... this scene definitely got changed at some point. The animation for the hallway being crushed seems to have taken longer originally as the timing is all off. Aquarium also, in my testing, tends to fly off into the abyss before we even hear them talk, indicating a lot of missing pieces to this early sequence. I didn’t change anything about that original relay, by the way, I just renamed everything else so it’d be able to hook into them. So, what we have here is a cut cameo appearance from a cut character, where the Aquarium Core would fall into the Chamber hallway, detach from the claw and spout a line as it turned its Flashlight on, only to be sent into the abyss. There's even a func_button entity here which specifically is meant to eat your inputs, called "prevent_sphere_pickup", which further indicates this was the Aquarium Core. But what if I told you this cameo appearance of the Aquarium Core here actually did make it into the final game? Tell me, do you recall a moment in all of Portal 2, where you see a core that is held by a pincer claw with a turned on flashlight that people associate with a green eye? He made it in. That’s right, THIS fella, who the community has dubbed the "Flashlight Core", was the Aquarium Core all along, acting as the punchline to this hallway joke. Not only did he then survive by his successor, the Space Core, but he made it into the final game as nothing more than a light fixture named “core8_display”. Now that we’ve gone over this first cut Easter egg, we can now move onto— Hold on. Play back what I just said there? "—as nothing more than a light fixture named 'core8_display'." Core8…? But there’s only three other cores in this entire room… ...ohh, no— In sp_a4_finale4, the final map of the whole game, you get introduced to the corrupted cores that PotatOS says will be instrumental in taking down Wheatley, as corrupting him with them will induce another core transfer. The corrupted cores here, being the Space Core, Adventure Core (also known as Rick), and the Fact Core, all are named with the convention of “core#_display”, sitting in this pile of other disused cores. However, right next to this booth is a second pile of cores. Have you ever felt this second pile was…strangely empty? Well, as you enter the lift to ride up into Wheatley’s lair, you hit an optimization trigger that kills the display core entitles. However, this trigger tries to fire into four other display cores that do not exist in the level, being core4, core5, core6, and core7. Of course, the existing core8 here is the Aquarium Core as we just discussed in our previous fact. That means, though, that this second pile of cores was meant to have some active corrupted cores sitting in it. The question becomes, who were these cores? It can’t be the cut beta cores, being the Morgan Freeman Sphere, Pendleton, or Quint, because the Aquarium Core is already sitting here as a light fixture, meaning there’d still be one less core. Instead, I believe we may be able to interpret an answer from a few leftover pieces of cut content. This is prop_personality_sphere, an unused entity that exists in Portal 2. It’s an older version of npc_personality_core, which is used in the game for every Personality Core. This older entity is actually more closely related to prop_glados_ball, the entity used in Portal 1 for GLaDOS’s personality cores, due to prop_personality_sphere being made in 2009 and used for a good while onwards. The thing that makes prop_personality_sphere more closely related to its ancestor is how exactly what core it is is decided. With the final npc_personality_core, it’s incredibly modular, as the cores are proper NPCs. By default, you can set what model they need to use, what skin of that model, and what actor name, all separately. For example, Space Core is set to use the alternate model with skin 1, given the actor name of “core01”. However, Portal 1’s cores are essentially… props! What core they are is defined by what CoreType setting they’ve been set to. This keyvalue sets what model skin to use and what dialogue they should be playing. To quickly summarise, the values are: 0 for Curious, 1 for Aggressive, which is the default, 2 for Crazy, and 3 for None. However, for Portal 2’s prop_personality_sphere, they take this initial list and they add two new CoreTypes, being: 3 — Richard, which was a catch-all CoreType as Richard Lord voiced all Portal 2 cores at the time, and 4 — Aquarium, which ends up with “None” getting pushed to 5. Now, the important thing to note here is that the original Portal 1 cores were not removed; In fact, they were intentionally kept, since they found use in 2009 as some of the cores you were meant to retrieve to repair GLaDOS. To wrap this all around, I believe Valve may have planned for the cores from Portal 1 to actually cameo in this second corrupted core pile, using prop_personality_sphere so that they would truly be the original cores. But what designs would they have used? Well, the unused core skins sitting in the files may give us an answer. See, we’ve all come to accept these as being the designs for the Morgan Freeman Core, Aquarium Core, and Pendleton, respectively. However, I think we could put forward a case that once those all characters were scrapped, they found a new home as the looks of the Portal 1 Cores. Think about it! We have practically all the core eye colours accounted for with these skins, and all it’d take is for the Knowledge Core to reuse Wheatley, as he’s noticeably busted up by this point of the game. Taking this all into account, we have a scrapped Easter egg where you’d likely have seen the original cast of Portal 1 cores sitting in this second corrupted core pile, as a nod to the finale of the first game, which honestly I think would’ve been really, really sweet to see. Our next cut Easter egg is actually many that were all simultaneously scrapped at once, and I reckon this’ll be not only an interesting topic, but one that may sound familiar. Infamously during Portal 2’s development, there was an idea thrown around that there should be plenty of alternate, joke endings for the player to find, all of which would be fitted with their very own ending songs alongside the credits to the game. This idea however was scrapped after the writers of Portal 2 realised they couldn’t come up with as many jokes as they thought they could. Despite the fact these are scrapped, there are potentially two that made it into the final game, these being the fake chamber in the initial moments of Portal 2’s Escape Sequence, and the pit at the start of Chapter 9. In both cases, there’s a unique dialogue exchange coupled with the player dying and getting an achievement for it. However, this is just speculative. What we do know however is of three total alternate endings they came up with; however, it seems likely that none of these were ever implemented in-game. To start, let’s talk about one that we have the song for, but not its context. (gentle acoustic guitar music) This is GLaDOS’s Song being performed by Ellen McClain, voice actor of GLaDOS, and John Patrick Lowrie, voice of the TF2 Sniper and Half-Life 2 citizens (John’s the one playing guitar). This song has been given the name “Don’t Say Goodbye” by the Portal community, due to the consistent use of the line in the track. Unlike every other Portal ending song, counting Still Alive and Want You Gone — even alongside LEGO Dimensions’ You Wouldn’t Know — GLaDOS’s Song is incredibly special, because Ellen McClain wrote this song herself, rather than Jonathan Coulton. It is, in a quite literal sense, GLaDOS’s Song. Ellen wrote the song and then refined it with John’s help. This song was not made for any specific alternate ending; instead, they had recorded it and sent it off to Valve in the hopes the Portal 2 team could find a befitting spot to use it in the game, which would’ve been an alternate ending. However, the song didn’t get used as the alternate endings concept was cut. I’d say it’s entirely reasonable they never even did come up with a spot for it, which is a huge shame, because GLaDOS’s Song is one of the most beautiful tracks to come out of the Portal series, truly encapsulating the emotions that GLaDOS feels about Chell. In an ironic twist of fate, GLaDOS’s Song ending up unused perfectly fits GLaDOS’s character. She’s too full of pride to admit her true feelings to Chell, hiding it behind witty remarks, with the closest it ever gets is the Turret Opera, which is mostly comprised of "Italian gibberish" according to Mike Morasky, the musician for Portal 2, except for the one, single line that Ellen McClain had intended: “I’m going to miss you, goodbye my beloved.” An alternate ending we do actually know about is something dubbed the Two Minute Ending. During the Portal 2 Post Mortem GDC Talk held by Erik Wolpaw and Chet Falizsak, there was mention of an alternate ending idea where the game could somehow end in the first two minutes of the game, and the song that would play would essentially be solely about those first two minutes. This ending also does not have any tangible remnants in the final game, indicating it never left the concept stage. The final cut ending we know of is perhaps one of the most well known besides the planned Don’t Say Goodbye track. This ending we’re specifically talking about is known as the Moon Ending. The Moon Ending was an idea that actually seems to have received some testing, wherein at some point in the early game, players would be capable of shooting a portal on the moon that would suck them out into space. Infamously, it was known that The National’s “Exile Vilify” would’ve played during this sequence. What isn’t as well known, however, is that Exile Vilify possibly had used an entirely different set of lyrics prior to the ones that they went with for the final game. In the same aforementioned Post Mortem GDC Talk, Erik Wolpaw describes the song that would’ve played as "a sad song about the moon". If you listen to Exile Vilify however, none of the lyrics seem to indicate this theme in any regard. The answer for this and the potential rewriting were mentioned by Mike Morasky on a podcast known as Podcast 17, where they had interviewed him. Here’s what Mike has to say about Exile Vilify: (Mike Morasky) ...and so it was a little bit of an experiment. We had a whole ending in mind. Not ending, a whole kind of sequence. It was a fake ending, actually, where that was meant to play, originally, and sort of what we kinda were working towards, and then through the design process we kinda determined that that fake ending wasn't actually gonna work. And so we then looked, based on the music that—the roughs that they were giving us, and where we were gonna go with that, they... we figured out that it was kind of perfect for Rattman's situation, and — what his situation would have been, and I think in the end it's just a great piece of music that works well in that context, I think. (Ossy) What Mike Morasky is telling us here is that once the Moon Ending was scrapped, they still wanted to keep The National’s involvement in Portal 2. This likely led to them rewriting the song to be more contextually appropriate for Doug Rattman, placing the song to be coming from a radio in the Dual Lasers Rattman Den. My best guess for the location of the Moon Ending is actually in the very room you get the Portal Gun. If you look up, you’ll find that you’re actually underneath a broken ceiling that has scrawlings of the moon’s phases on it. The broken ceiling also perfectly frames a hole exposed to the sky, which possibly would have been where the Moon was visible. That should wrap up everything we know of the cut alternate endings, and with that, you may expect this video to be over, but taking one look at the runtime down below sure says a lot — we aren’t finished yet, because I’ve got one last surprise lined up for all of you. The ultimate cut Easter egg, and it centers around none other than everyone’s favourite Easter egg character, Doug Rattman. What I’m about to talk about is possibly one of the most obscure pieces of Portal 2 development knowledge we have ever come across. Something so mysterious, it was completely unheard of to any expert. Something that even caught me off guard. Something that has been unsolved for a decade. I’d like to introduce you all to what we call The Rattman Discs, by far the most mysterious piece of Portal 2 beta content to date. From our research, the best guess we’ve been able to make is that these seem to be a successor to the ARG radios that Portal 1 was given to hype up Portal 2, and we’re uncertain of even that. What exactly are these discs? From what we can tell, there seems to have been an idea to have laserdiscs laying around the singleplayer campaign that the player could find, and then they could locate a disc reader to play them. We know of only four levels that had these, and every single one is associated with Doug Rattman. The circumstances of their discovery was an anomaly in of themselves. Portal 2 researcher Litevex had been poking at a Resource List for an older version of the map for Chambers 04 and 05, and noticed that strangely, this early version of the map was calling for the laserdisc and disc reader models seen in the co-op campaign of Portal 2. The map also seems to call for the 1970s PC model. This was completely bizarre; if we look at the retail map, there would be literally no space to reasonably have these things exist. Unless… it was in the Rattman Den that this map contains featuring a desk with a computer on it, and some conspicuous empty space next to it. Chamber 05’s Rattman Den would’ve been the location of one of these disc readers. As for the disc itself? Well, the collapsed hallway to the elevator room has a random 1970’s filebox sitting in it, which would make much more sense if it was the location of one of the Rattman discs. Once we learnt of one disc however, we just kept finding more. In the map sp_a1_intro3, you pass through an office space after picking up the portal gun to reach the third test chamber. When you enter the test chamber through the broken observation window, there’s a trigger you hit that sets up the chamber. This trigger turns off the orange portal you used in the area with Doug’s murals, enables an invisible wall to prevent back-tracking, and then turns on the orange portal in Chamber 03. However, it also tries to fire four extra inputs to entities that no longer exist in the map. Another case of the "Dead I/O" phenomenon we explored back at the start of this video. All of these missing entities are all ones that are, once again, associated with the co-op campaign discs, specifically their screen component. The dead I/O here doesn’t reveal anything specific about what the screen could’ve displayed, the only thing we know for certain being the “Insert Disk” video that idly plays, and a light that would’ve been controlled by a timer entity. "aperture_movie" here would have been the entity name for the display that shows the actual video you get for inserting the disc. We can’t use this entity name to speculate, as aperture_movie is a generic name used across all the co-op disc sequences. It’s possible that the disc reader for this map may have been located in the observation room you come out of, as there’s a lot of empty space to otherwise fit the desk model we know Valve used. We don’t really know where the disc itself could’ve been, possibly residing in the offices beforehand or even the area where you get the portal gun. There’s another map we know had a disc reader, being part of the escape sequence, however, we don’t have this map: sp_sabotage_panel_sneak. We don’t know what this map ended up evolving into, possibly sp_a2_bts3 due to it loading a lot of the assets for the turret factory panels, but the assets that Panel Sneak tries to load did in fact load all the associated models with the Rattman Disc Easter egg, so lab_desk05, the disc reader, the disc itself, the 1970s PC, and even the 70s filebox from Chamber 05. The final map we’ll be covering is a very interesting case, as it’s one of the only maps in the entire game to still have one of the actual discs used in the cut sequences. Trust Fling is a special test chamber as it’s one of the few maps that Valve has provided the VMF source file to, so unlike previous maps, we can actually dig deeper into it. Trust Fling has this special sequence involving the cube dropper where upon first pressing it, it dispenses several pieces of garbage instead of a cube, requiring you to press the button again to actually get a cube. Speedrunners love this garbage sequence as it dispenses Edgeless Safety Cubes, letting them skip the need to press the button a second time, while secret hunters and completionists will go for saving the radio, as bringing it to the Rattman Den in the map nets an achievement and an SSTV signal that features a Companion Cube on the moon if decoded. However, there’s one peculiar item that also is part of the garbage heap, and yep, it’s none other than one of the discs. What makes this disc especially distinct is its entity name. Nearly all the trash objects that fall out of the cube dropper are named “malfunctioning_dropper_item”, with a corresponding number to each. Even the radio is named as such. Except for the disc — it’s simply named “disk” (with a K). This specific entity name is actually used for the laserdiscs used in the co-op campaign, indicating that if anything, this particular disc is the only surviving remnant of an actual Rattman Disc. We can find out even more by peering into the SDK- provided VMF that Valve provides us for Trust Fling, and it outright confirms this map to be the location of yet another Rattman Disc. There’s a trigger volume in the Rattman Den to play the music associated with these locations and set up the Final Transmission achievement. For some reason however, this trigger volume is named “video_click_enable”. There is no video-related thing in this Den, meaning this trigger has to have been originally used for something else. I suspect it was likely to enable the monitor screen that would’ve existed in this Rattman Den so that it displays the "Insert Disk" video. And naturally, the final thing we can work out is… The desk in the corner. Once more, this is lab_desk05, just like every single previous Rattman Disc location we’ve discovered. However, the one thing that makes this specific desk stand out is the fact that it’s been marked as part of a visgroup. Visgroups are used by map makers for various purposes, but usually it’s to group stuff together that you can then easily toggle on and off for visibility purposes, hence the name. The desk here is in a visgroup called “Ratman_stuff”, and it is the only thing in that visgroup, which means that this visgroup is undoubtedly one that used to contain the disc reader, PC, and all associated logic entities for the Rattman Discs, now lost to time. So, what the hell were these Rattman Discs? Why were they seemingly littered all over the game only to vanish without a trace as to their context? Why couldn’t I find a single developer interview that mentioned these anywhere I looked? Usually with Portal 2 development there’s always something to pull from information-wise that explains it, but with this, all we get is, I don’t know, I guess Josh Weier explaining why they cut the idea of Doug Rattman physically appearing in the game? (Remix narrating) ...specifically if he was ever going to appear in Portal 2, and it seems like the team briefly considered it. "I think we didn't spend a long time on that, because — "there's always this thing in games where you can make it look really good and timeless "until you show a person, and then you instantly date your game." (Ossy) Oh... because having him physically appear would date the game? Y’know, I may have a theory, actually. Now, this is completely and utterly baseless, and you shouldn’t take this as fact at all, but what if the Rattman Discs contained something like video diaries from Doug? Here’s the thing: these discs could have played literally anything else, they could, I don’t know, play the elevator screen videos, or something else entirely, but I feel like it has to be something related to Doug Rattman in some way. I mean, that visgroup in Trust Fling was literally named “Ratman_stuff”, you can’t get more explicit than that! If Portal 2 development is anything to go by, it’s that if the team feels strongly about an idea, it is going to make it in some form, and I think the Rattman Discs may have been a solution devised to the idea of showing Rattman! Now you get to have the player see him without him physically having to be there. Obviously I am totally making this up all on the spot and I can’t verify it, but hey, I thought it would be a cute potential explanation as to what is otherwise a completely unknowable mystery. I’d be interested to hear what you all think the Rattman Discs may have contained! With that, though, that is pretty much every major cut Easter egg from Portal 2! What do you think overall? Did any of these deserve to make it into the final version of the game? Leave a comment down below with your thoughts, and hey, you’re not gonna find anyone else as obsessed with Portal as I am, so give me a subscribe, support me on Patreon, join my Discord, and I’ll see you in the next video! Stay safe out there, peace! Captions by Reese Rivers BlueSky: @reeserivers.org

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Channel: Ossy Flawol

Views: 161,007

Rating: undefined out of 5

Keywords: portal, portal 2, doug rattman, portal lore, portal aquarium core, portal beta, portal 2 alternate ending, portal 2 easter eggs, portal easter eggs, portal 2 core hub, portal space core

Id: Y3XSqdD4aSQ

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2024