Update on Portal news and Drattmanh0nee secret revealed!

Apparently the rumors in our Portal story were actually truthors. Today, Valve released the following very short announcement;

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March 5, 2010, 9:44 am - Valve - Press Release
Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike and Half-Life) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced Portal 2 for shipment this coming holiday season.

Portal 2 is the sequel to 2007's Portal, which won 70 industry achievement awards.

For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com

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Yes, those underlines were intentional. The underlined characters actually spell out drattmanh0nee, which is actually a login for a BBS that was hidden in the radio transmissions of Portal's latest update. Don't want to go to all the trouble to log into the BBS and then convert the revealed code into QBasic? I don't blame you. In a nutshell, here is what it all results in.





  

These easter eggs seem to confirm Game Informer's reports that the sequel will offer up co-op game play. In their article revealing April's cover, Game Informer also details that Portal 2 will be a full length stand alone game.

So Cake fans rejoice, because Portal as a franchise is still alive.

Valve updates Portal with... a new ending?

In case you haven't heard, a new patch went live this week for Valve's critically acclaimed FPS/Puzzle/Platformer/Cake Simulator. While everyone loves an update, it seemed strange to many that Portal would receive an update. What was even more unusual was the notes for the patch that simply stated "changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations." This patch added radios on every level that when picked up and carried to a specific spot in the map would transmit a special coded message. These messages seemed to range from everything from program code to morse code.

Then yesterday, another patch went live. This time, the note simply reads ""Added valuable asset retrieval." Another cryptic patch note led more curious players to start playing the game again to see what was added. Apparently, this latest patch added a new ending to the game, which you can see below.

**Of course this contains spoilers. It's the ending of a game. Don't be thick.**


With this new ending, that is strangely less ambiguous while being even more mysterious, has led many people to speculate that there will be a Portal announcement from Valve at the Game Developers Conference next week in San Fransisco. Another rumor also swirling about the interwubs is that Valve might be announcing a Steam Application for Mac. This could be a possibility since Valve is currently in beta for a totally revamped Steam program for the PC. It might be possible we will see a Mac version going live the same time the PC version gets the large upgrade.

I for one just wish we would get some Half-Life 2: Episode 3 news...