Portal and the ARGonauts.

Yesterday amidst exploding PS3s and Activision’s military coup against Infinity Ward, something even stranger happened. For those who haven’t yet stared bleary eyed at the coverage of the most recent, and unannounced, Portal update and uncovered the sugary goodness inside it, let’s recap. Quietly and with no explanation, an update was put into effect for the brilliantly engrossing (and now nearly three years old) Portal that said only that it “changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations.” As people dived back into the world of insane robots and thoeretical cake, they discovered that the radio at the very beginning of the game now gave off various bursts of static if you carried it to different areas.

In true internet fashion, somewhere someone began to look deeper into it and found out that it didn’t stop there.Eventually somebody dissected the WAV files themselves and found that it produced a code which was then run through a stenography program, and I can’t believe somebody even thought to do that. This produced a series of numbered images which lead to a data line for an encrypted BBS near the Valve headquarters in Washington. The BBS contained bizarre data that produced the interesting ASCII art you can see at the bottom of the page. Are you mind blown yet? This might not even be the tip of the iceberg, as a thread on the Steam forums has been hard at work discovering what other secrets this must hold.

Although Valve is smart enough to realize that ARGs/viral marketing are by far the best ways to advertise a product (plus ARGs take us one step closer to all pervasive advertising, which takes us one step closer to a dystopian cyberpunk future which I approve off deeply) and will most likely tie this in to something else, even if nothing comes from it the whole idea is a great diversion for Portal fans and squeezes even more value out of a game that already had the most bang for your buck in recent history. Valve continues to prove why PC gamers consider them the messiahs of the platform.

Of course, you can speculate all day about what any of this means, but in my opinion there is only one conclusion- GLaDoS is the Cloverfield monster and she really likes bees. Oh, and maybe Gabe will announce Portal 2 at the GDC on March 11. Either or.

[Source: Steam (This is the thread to keep track of the breaking news since 90% of us are too lazy to actually participate.)]