What the hell, Valve?
I’m a couple days late to this party — work and all — but Valve has started releasing a series of peculiar updates to Portal. The first one states — and I’m copying this verbatim from the Steam news entry — "Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations." What this amounts to is a whole lot of confusing dickery related to the radios in the game; apparently they now broadcast (when brought to certain places) a bunch of static-y noise that can be decoded by running it through an SSTV converter into a series of strange pictures. MD5 decoding of the number sequences involved yields a phone number in Kirkland, Washington which is apparently an Aperture Science BBS, along with a username and password for logging into the BBS. The BBS apparently contains a whole lot of new weird images and words.
You probably think I made all that up. And yet.
I’m told that was an elaborate trigger mechanism; the BBS was sort of a trap, and once a certain number of users logged into it, it triggered the release of the second Portal update, launched with the cryptic line "Added valuable asset retrieval." This update alters the game’s ending; I’m reinstalling Portal now to check that out, because I’m the exact type of painfully nerdy nerd who won’t be satisfied to go look up a spoiler or see the video on YouTube; I have to run the new ending myself.
I’m thinking this is a viral prelaunch ceremony for Portal 2. We’ll see.
Edit: Portal rebeaten.
Extended ending does exist. Also, I think there may be some minor texture changes in the game, but I’m not 100% certain; I spotted some things I never noticed before, but it’s possible I was just looking more carefully this time since I was in pursuit of weirdness. Also there’s this:
