New players get all of this, wrapped up in a package discounted by 75 percent.
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Old fans get hundreds of hours of new content in their favorite indie games, plus a metagame built on top of it all. Indie developers, who don't have the benefit of a multi-million-dollar marketing budget, draw attention to their titles and benefit from the Potato Sack sales. Valve draws attention to the Portal 2 launch. If they want to have access to the new content and participate in the metagame, they'll need to own the game, and have an authenticated connection with the Steam servers.Įveryone wins. I suspect that the ARG converted quite a few pirates to legitimate customers. This philosophy sets Steam apart from other portals, where content updates are difficult, if not impossible. The Portal 2 ARG is a great example of Valve's philosophy of digital distribution: let's give new value to our old games in a way that engages our existing fans and draws in new ones.
The event is designed to culminate with the crescendo, in which players will spend time in each of the participating games to roll back the Portal 2 launch clock. We schedule enough time between the content releases to allow players to solve the puzzles and to give the media time to pick up the story. To make it easier for hard-core fans to participate in every aspect of the ARG, we plan to release all of the participating games for 75 percent off in a bundle called The Potato Sack. New content will be added to the games in three phases, starting with only vague mysteries and working up to GLaDOS making an explicit appearance. This was a project built on trust and mutual respect.ĭuring our two days at Valve, we formulated the minimalist story that we would use to drive the event: GLaDOS has infiltrated our games and she slowly makes herself visible as she seeks to make her comeback.
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Just pack a room full of fun, creative people and give them unrestricted access to Valve's resources, including Portal 2 assets. With everyone gathered in Valve's sixth-floor fishbowl conference room, Gabe Himself lays out the core idea: Somehow use our Steam games to usher in the arrival of Portal 2. The next day, an invitation goes out a week later, on December 16, 2010, 20 indie developers fly in to Seattle, all somewhat confused as to why they are there in the first place. Following the success of the prior ARG, members of the Portal 2 team suggest that they'd like to do something similar in the lead-up to launch only this time, they'd like to wrangle the creative talents of some of the indie developers with popular Steam titles. Project Timelineįast-forward to December, 2010. The puzzles were challenging, but the whole sequence, from beginning to end, only took the community of players a few hours to solve. One clue led to the next to the next, sending players on a massive scavenger hunt that included dialing into an old-school BBS and retrieving cryptic ASCII images, culminating in the announcement that a sequel to the popular game was in the works. In the parlance of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), this is referred to as a "rabbit hole" - a point of entry into a much deeper universe.įrom the crackling radio transmissions, players managed to decode embedded images. In no time at all, players figured out that if they carried the in-game radios to specific locations within each level, they could change the radio transmission. Way back in March of 2010, Valve added a mysterious new achievement to Portal.
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