Portal 2 News

Both entries in the Portal series have some deep roots in indie games, and one of the primary inspirations for Portal 2 is now available on Steam. The sequel's gel mechanics originate in a student game called Tag: The Power of Paint, and while it's been available as freeware online for years, you can now get it on Valve's own platform, too.

Tag was developed by students at DigiPen Institute of Technology back in 2009. It's a first-person puzzle platformer with a paint gun you can use to spray the environment with various colours. Those colours confer the floor and walls with properties that let you slide or bounce off the surface. It's a fun time, and only about 30 minutes long - check it out on Steam if you haven't already played it.

A bunch of indie awards were conferred on Tag, and Valve hired the team behind the project to implement many of those concepts into the gel system for Portal 2. That mirrors the development story of the original Portal - another group of Digipen students released Narbacular Drop in 2005, and were hired by Valve to bring its concepts into a full game.

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Portal co-writer Erik Wolpaw: "We've gotta start Portal 3"

Portal 2 mod overhauls the graphics to Half-Life: Alyx level

Valve's finalised Steam Deck packaging comes complete with Portal Easter eggs

"We've gotta start Portal 3. That's my message to... whoever." Those words from Erik Wolpaw, who co-wrote both Portal and Portal 2 along with such titles as Team Fortress 2, Half-Life 2, Half-Life: Alyx, and Left 4 Dead, will no doubt whip fans up into a frenzy. However, Wolpaw is quick to constrain expectations. "I can't do it by myself," he says to Kiwi Talkz host Reece Reilly.

"I could advocate for it," says Wolpaw, "It might help a little bit, but the problem is with 300 employees there's a lot of opportunity cost to taking 75 people and getting a game made." He goes on to speak about the workplace at Valve and explains that getting a new project spun up isn't easy. "As much as it seems like Valve often is just a bunch of people sitting around sipping gin and tonics by a pool, everybody's working."

Wolpaw says that while Valve's employees are constantly working on a variety of projects, people don't always see the results - either because they end up not coming out, arriving years down the line, or are turned into something else entirely. He says that "everybody is accounted for... you'd have to stir up a bunch of people to leave what they're currently working on and come work on something else. In this case it'd be Portal 3."

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The free indie game that became part of Portal 2 hits Steam

Portal 2 mod overhauls the graphics to Half-Life: Alyx level

Valve's finalised Steam Deck packaging comes complete with Portal Easter eggs

A Portal 2 mod "in development for several years" plans to overhaul the adventure game's graphics to make Aperture Science look as good as Valve Software's most recent game Half-Life: Alyx made City 17 look - and Portal 2: Desolation will get a new story, too. So, Portal 3, right?

While we wouldn't necessarily call it an old game, Portal 2 is both an all-time classic and, well, nearly eleven years old at this point. Not only does Half-Life: Alyx look much better than it, so does a free game set in Aperture Science that Valve released to promote the Steam Deck.

The ambitious Portal 2: Desolation mod aims to change all that, on top of a brand new story. It's already been in development for a few years - we last heard about it in 2019, where it promised a more "unsettling" story in the Portal universe along with 40-50 test chambers of moderate difficulty and an average playtime of roughly six to eight hours.

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Valve's finalised Steam Deck packaging comes complete with Portal Easter eggs

Portal 2 gets an update out of the blue, and it scraps the Workshop level file size limit

This Portal 2 mod is basically Portal 3