Transmission Received? | Portal's First ARG

most recently we decided to try to answer that question in the context of a product announcement we said why don't we partner with our with our customers let's use this as an opportunity to bring them in where uh there have as much of a role in in in in bringing this new product forward you know we'll start off by doing an update to a three-year-old game and plant Clues throughout this so that they can figure out that something's going on and decode satellite data and so on so good luck figuring it out and way back involves golden age of Half-Life and portal they connected to their farm base in ways other developers did not in 2010 valve decided to announce and promote Portal 2 in a completely out of the box way through an alternate reality game where valve could use their fans to essentially promote the game for them with rumors that valve were working on a sequel to the highly successful portal they knew exactly how to grab the attention of their most dedicated fans in this video I'll explore Portal's first alternate reality game on March the 1st 2010 portal received an update around two and a half years after its original release and looking at these patch notes the community saw what the update was the patch notes read changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state Spectrum management regulations and this also came with a new achievement transmission received so what did this actually mean upon loading up a new playthrough of portal the players that had already completed the campaign noticed something different there were Now 26 radios in total throughout the game some hidden and some in plain sight for those hidden the players did not have to look far as they played out the iconic song Still Alive in that upbeat Tempo the radios are known for these are the radios before the update and this is a radio after the update the huge difference here is the Red Dot so the players had to pick up each radio upon Discovery and look for the spot in the test chamber to pick up a signal this was fairly easy to do as the radio emitted aesthetic as it got closer and the Red Dot turned green when the radio was in the right spot when in the correct spot each radio played a unique sound while in the game only four of the 26 sounds had some sort of meaning these four were Morse code and for the other 22 the community had to figure out what to do with them on a side note after all 26 radios were discovered taken to the correct location in the test chamber and each transmission was received so was the achievement after exploring the game file the portal Community discovered where these 26 sounds were stored and these files were named dinosaur 1 up to dinosaur 26. with there been 26 letters in the alphabet and with these files named dinosaur fans quickly linked this to the book dinosaur alphabet written by Harry S Robbins who is most well known for his voice acting of Half-Life characters his most famous being Dr Isaac Kleiner I guess this has nothing to do with the AIG itself but it is a cool Easter egg upon further investigation the fanbase experimented with the sound files in various ways to see if they could acquire any more clues on how to progress with the ARG and quickly it was discovered that if these images were viewed in slow scan television software these sounds turned into images and here we have 22 images and four most code messages so we'll begin with the morse code radio signals 1 5 12 and 17 each have a different message the first dinosaur one reads interior transmission active external data line active message digest active the second dinosaur 5 is an amalgamation of letters and numbers the third dinosaur 12 reads system backup dump active user backup active password backup active and the fourth dinosaur 17 comes out as lol after working together on the valve forums the community discovered that the amalgamation of letters and numbers in dinosaur 5 could be decoded using the md5 message digest algorithm where this long chunk turned in to this the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog this is a well-known sentence that contains every letter in the alphabet it's used to mostly test typewriters computer keyboards and anywhere else a complete alphabet is needed to make sure each letter is working these discoveries from the morse code would come in handy later on to the images we can see that this collection is made up of random pictures looking through we can see a toy cow an aperture science lab coat a skull and a few other random images there are also some pictures that contain four Images within them dinosaur 2 4 7 13 16 18 20 and 25 and looking closer we can see numbers and letters in these one per box for example dinosaur 2 has three zero six eight when each image has been explored we have eight sets of four 32 numbers or letters in total so this appears to be a code looking even closer at the numbers we can see their order out of 32 on the bottom right of each image so here we can rearrange our sets of four into the correct order where we receive this now what is this code for using the same md5 hash method we use for the dinosaur 2 code we get this 425-822-5251 instantly this looks like some sort of shortened phone number looking at the image from dinosaur 3 we can see this has a similar format three numbers in a bracket followed by three numbers a dash and then four numbers and in front of this the letters b b s after a quick Google search we can see that BBS is or was the bulletin board system this was used in the early 1980s to upload and download data read news bulletins and exchange messages but to use a BBS number you have to either have BBS software or a 56k modem which in 2010 I'm not sure many people dead luckily in our age of the internet BBS software is easy to get and after entering our number 425-822-5251 we are taken to a login screen where it asks for a username and a password now for this we have to go back to our Morse code dinosaur 12 mentions something about a username and a password system data dump active user backup active password backup active so looking closer we can see that the username is backup and the password is backup and after entering these we get access to the system data backup interestingly enough a fan speculated that the line GLaDOS v3.11 refer to the date 11th of March where Gabe Newell the founder of valve was scheduled to attend the game developer choice Awards and he would reveal information about portal 2. after this the user was given access to a file dump this was huge and gave the fans excited for portal 2. firstly confirmation that it was on the way and secondly a huge insight into what they were to get I know if I would have seen this back then I would have gone nuts this unlike the last AIG was a worthy reward this was also a lot harder than the Half-Life 2 ARG I have also made a video on that it seems that valve had learned their lesson here this data dump contained art images concept art and memos from Cave Johnson which we would later hear over the aperture sound system as we ventured the older parts of aperture reading these now I can hear them in his voice eventually the fans match these images to their official counterparts years later later and this appeared to be the end of the ARG but it was not on March the 3rd 2010 portal received another patch although we had concept art on how Portal 2 would look we were still unsure on how this sequel would link up to the first so far chal had escaped the facility after fighting with GLaDOS but this update made a slight change to that the patch note stated added valuable asset retrieval this referred to a new ending where after child defeats GLaDOS we now hear the party escort bot mentioned in the campaign approach an unconscious child where it asks her to thank you for assuming that as she has pulled back into the facility and here the valuable asset ciao is received this patch also came with an update to the ARG where the users who signed into the BBS system discovered this a valuable asset retrieval initiated which suggested that the players had been responsible for this action and there was a progress bar with an estimated time remaining fans automatically believed this was a countdown to the official announcement of Portal 2 but the time remaining changed quite consistently just a few listed were 2797 Millennia 2871 geological eras cave Johnson's birthday and 36 days before next Saturday and so a fans waited patiently to find out what this progress bar meant two days later on March 5th at 9 44 am Portal 2 was officially announced on Steam and 20 minutes later at 10 04 am the progress bar hit the end it appeared that this progress bar was just to let the community know that something was coming and it had but this was not the end of the ARG something was odd about the official Portal 2 announcement some of the characters were underlined and after putting each underlined character together we find this dratman in the first paragraph and honey in the second so if we go back to the bulletin board system and try these as a username and password we get access to a new account Doug ratman's to be specific this discovery also came with a reward additional images for portal 2. but there was also a a code here that had to be decoded so the community once again looked around for a way to decode this he here one member signed back into the backup account and discovered something new the source code of the cube basic program using this the users were able to decode this code and receive two images as the first is a message to new participants who had volunteered to take part in The Cooperative testing initiative this suggested that Co-op would be available in Portal 2 which it was under the second showed two Aperture Science stick men together having completed a Cooperative trial this was the end of the ARG for now but there is still a little bit more to this story moving forward to March 11th the fans were correct in thinking that Gabe's appearance at the GDC was linked to the ARG he did receive his reward as a Pioneer and in his speech he spoke about how he had partnered with his customers the portal community and updated a three-year-old game with Clues so that fans could figure out what was going on most recently we decided to try to answer that question in the context of a product announcement we said why don't we partner with our with our customers let's use this as an opportunity to bring them in where there have as much of a role in in in in bringing this new product forward you know we'll start off by doing an update to a three-year-old game and plant Clues throughout this so that they can figure out that something's going on and decode satellite data and so on during his speech he said he wanted to touch on this and answer any questions that the fans may have regarding the ARG but as he clicked onto the next slide of his presentation he instead received the blue screen of death of course this was planned and Gabe had openly told the community that he was a part of the ARG fans quickly noticed something was different about this blue screen it was a command from GLaDOS and it said a fatal exception E2 has occurred press any key to flood the facility with neurotoxin we know this was how she murdered the Aperture Science us now as Gabe finished off his speech he blamed the blue screen on Microsoft that's what I get for working at Microsoft so good luck figuring it out and and thanked his wife as fans began to look deeper into this crash screen although this did look like a regular crash screen something was off with the error message so fans wrote down these irregularities and looked at how to convert this where they used a hexadecimal to ebcdic converter and received this if we break it up we can see suspended until E3 with the secret message fans knew that they would have to wait for more information at E3 in June 2010 and this appeared to be the final part of the first Portal 2 ARG at least for the fan interaction anyway leading up to E3 the valve sent out an email to the press as aperture science where they canceled their appearance at E3 on June 14th but they did have a surprise they wanted to share it is unclear on whether this was a part of the ARG as well or just a quirky way to announce a change in Portal 2's development timeline but a fan speculated anyway they stated that the surprise had no specific dates and they also announced here that valve would still continue with their Booth to show off Portal 2 on June 15th the game was later announced to be coming to Playstation 3 which many believed to have been the surprise this was the end of the radio and BBs ARG there was another AIG to promote Portal 2 later in 2011 but that is a story for another video this was a breakdown of the first portal ARG I love this kind of stuff and it is kind of sad to look back and think that we may never get something like this again from valve as they appear to be more focused on developing technology instead of games but then again there are two rumored Half-Life games in development so hopefully we will the rewards throughout for this ARG were pretty impressive for the time and although this was a hard ARG it was absolutely worth it for that payoff I love anything where a community is brought together to discover information on a game they collectively love we need more like this I have nothing else really to add this week I think I put my thoughts into this video as I went along if you would like to stay up to date with everything I do outside of YouTube and fancy some behind the scenes content then follow my Twitter and Instagram um I am trying to post more on that finally I would like to thank my gold tier patrons and channel members Jonas Lewis Queen Arby fluffy the dragon chicken guy791 Ruba Mendoza mosfolit Montana tusca and this week while welcoming it's Sophie I'm sorry if I said that wrong they joined this week as a galtier patron if you want to help support the channel then there is a link in the description and as always thank you so much for your continued support what did you think of this ARG did you participate in it and what would you like to see next let me know in the comments below now this is where our story ends check back next week for a new one bye thank you

Channel: Skyrionn

Views: 264,124

Keywords: portal, arg, portal arg, portal 2, portal 2 arg, portal 1, portal arg story, portal arg explained, el arg de portal, valve arg, arg olvidado de portal, portal 3, portal lab rat, portal mod, tf2 portal, portal iceberg, arg explained, portal lore, portal song, portal 2007, portal 1 iceberg, portal 2 iceberg, portal gameplay, portal comic, portal facts, chell portal, portal 2 2020, portal 2 song, portal valve, rtx, portal with rtx, radio, skyrionn, lore, bbs, nvidia

Id: rXQmYKqSjAs

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2022