Half-Life 2: Episode X may have seemingly fallen by the wayside, but Valve is clearly hard at work on some crazy stuff. Portal 2 comes out next week, and the company is already having fun with a seemingly impossibly intricate ARG revolving around the game. The madness started on April 1st, Potato Fool’s Day, when Valve sold the Potato Sack indie game bundle. $38 and change for a ton of games including Super Meat Boy, Bit.Trip Runner, Defense Grid, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Killing Floor. It seemed innocent enough, but then… strange things happened.
A timeline of Potato Fool’s Day can be read on the Valve ARG Wiki, but it sums up like this: in the past two weeks, increasing numbers of Portal sightings have been found in the Potato Sack games, starting with the seemingly random presence of potatoes. Super Meat Boy has become Super Potato Boy. The castle in Amnesia is littered with potatoes. Recently, the Potato Sack games have gotten full-out Portal references, like GladOS peeking out and watching you play Bit.Trip Runner. It’s all a nice, innocent tie-in event, right? Seeing Portal characters and art all over indie games, right?
On the surface, yes. Under the surface, this is a truly bizarre and elaborate ARG that only the most dedicated and deranged gamers have been able to uncover. Among them is spitfire1945 of the Steam user forums, who put together a breathtaking amount of information about the Portal 2 ARG in this thread. Basically, it goes deeper than little jokes and bits of Portal references in games.
We’re talking poems. Glyphs. Web sites. Cyphers. Hardware integration. Dan Brown has nothing on the Portal 2 ARG. Hell, Umberto Eco has nothing on the Portal 2 ARG. The full story is on spitfire1945′s thread, but here are the highlights.
Chapter 1: A poem in Amnesia: The Dark Descent leads to a circuit around every game in the Potato Sack bundle.
Chapter 2: Games become filled with tiny details like mysterious glyphs pointing toward the next game.
Chapter 3: Gamers with Razer peripherals find mysterious “Cult of Razer” messages in the games.
Chapter 4: Multiple SteveSays and ProcyProxy TinyURLs are found, leading to strange facts about potatoes.
Chapter 7: The ARG hits the web with the Sandy May or May Not Be Fictional blog and other strange social networking trails with small pointers from the Potato Sack bundle.
Chapter 8: The games lead to Aperture Science login web sites accessible only by performing some truly obscure maneuvers.
Chapter 11: The ARG hits reality in Seattle as gamers look for clues based on a strange map of the city.
Chapter 12: Reserved for Science, you monster.
Chapter 17: Reserved for Science, you monster.
Chapter 23: Reserved for Science, you monster.
Chapter 27: Reserved for Science, you monster.
Chapter Apple: Reserved for Science, you monster.
Chapter Cookie: Reserved for Science, you monster.
Chapter Oh God: I’m Scared.
Yeah. This ARG is so complex and impressive I’m not even mad that Valve could have spent this mindboggling amount of effort working on a new Half-Life game. Now, if you don’t mind me, I’m going to curl up into a cube and cry.
