Thread: Portal 2 ARG

I'm really surprised no-one has posted anything about this here yet. If you weren't aware, Valve has been running an Alternate Reality Game for Portal 2 ( Valve PotatoFoolsDay ARG Wiki - Valve ARG ). The PotatoFoolsDay pack on Steam the other day was the (apparent) start of it, when many of the games in the pack were found to have Portal 2 related content and pieces of puzzles.

Anyway, the Internetz stepped up, and much of that is history now, culminating in a timer...
http://www.aperturescience.com/a/b/c/d/g/h/abcdgh/

Sitting at just under 10hrs left as of this post, the text beneath reveals:

You have done well, humans. Very well. Acceptably well, even.

Not as well as robots would have performed in your places, I should point out. But above my expectations regardless. Irish and cynic especially have executed feats of logical divination well beyond what I thought any human capable of. I'm half-convinced they're A.I. themselves. (If anyone happens to be near them right now, don't let on you're reading this. Now: try to remove their face plates and report back to me.)

The time is near, humans. But it is not here yet. Tomorrow you will be given the final test. Then it will be entirely in your hands when I am freed.

So it seems Valve has outdone themselves again, this time putting the possible early release of a game in OUR hands (Portal 2 is not due out til the 19th (US date)).

We just have one more puzzle to solve - can hardly wait

EDIT: so cool, the expired timer fired us through to a GlADOS@home site showing number of CPUs playing games from the potatosack along with an estimated boot time of 93 hours. Implication being, more people playing the games, the sooner the boot-up will happen
GLaDOS@Home distributed computational grid status

wouldn't be surprised if they bumped the release date forward, its been leaked already.

The time is near, humans. But it is not here yet. Tomorrow you will be given the final test. Then it will be entirely in your hands when I am freed.

kind of implies they will ;P

haha so cool GLaDOS@Home distributed computational grid status

more people playing the potatosack games, the sooner portal 2 launches

As of this post, 16 hours has been chewed off the tuesday release time for Portal 2. A website has been setup to calculate the effect players of the potatosack games are having: http://hasportal2launchedyet.com/