The Portal 2 Arg Postmortem

FAST DOWNLOADadsOn Saturday morning, the 11th December, I came across a strange mail as I did my early inbox checking. The email in question was an invite from Valve, asking us to visit them on the 17th, merely 6 days away, for reasons that were quite obscure. The only thing we knew was that it had to do with Portal 2 and that it might involve other game developers. We were of course intrigued, but at the same time a bit reluctant as we had to travel, a not short journey, in only a few days. However, after a few minutes of deep introspection, we thought "what the heck" and decided to go.

Having come to this decision we were not sure if we would be able to travel though. Two years earlier it had become mandatory to have a visa in order to enter the US. Remembering the trouble we had with visas for ourcryptic blog post, with the intent of introducing the community to a character that might help and confuse them during the ARG. Our initial plan was to keep everything "in-character" according to our own sub-story, with forums posts complaining about escaped animals and the like, hopefully with people wondering what was true and what was not. Unfortunately, it was figured out very quickly that the whole thing was an ARG for Portal 2 (or at least the general Internet-consensus was this) and instead we just used the character to hand over some hints.


Finally the ARG arrived and people threw themselves over our update. This first update was really just meant to contain very little of interest, essentially only displaying a special glyph, a letter and peculiar sentence. To pad out the update a bit, and to hide the hints from people searching the new files, we added some un-exciting assets from "Justine" and a few fake hieroglyphs that were only visible to those not looking for the glyphs in-game. It turned out that almost no attention was paid to the important content though, instead most people were extremely excited about the "Justine" assets, some even convinced that a new secret level was hidden somewhere (and found several plausible locations for this lost place). The hieroglyphs also turned out to be more interesting than the correct glyph, and people even started to decipher their meaning. I actually felt a bit bad about this, and even though no ancient Egyptian expertise would be needed, we decided to use the glyphs somehow in later updates.


This brings us to the second update, in which we were supposed to have some minor Portal hints. Our choice of hint was to project the shadow of one of the Portal 2 robots onto a wall in the start menu. My hope was that people would take a screenshot, and make photoshop-enhanced images, ala big foot footage, with heated discussions on what it look like ensuing. That did not work out as planned of course, and instead someone found the actual texture, where the portal 2 robot was clearly visible, even before it was spotted in the menu. Our evil plan was spoiled. Lesson learned: always hide the fun stuff!

The shadow of a robot was not all that was part of the second update though. We had also added some clues, that lead up to a special steam overlay and a password for Rush. At first these clues where all simply in a note and a clear voice message. But as we thought it was so fun to watch people trying to crack the riddles and search our files at the first update, we decided to add more content and make the puzzles a bit harder. This was accomplished by encrypting the (already cryptic) text with a non-standard substitution cipher and by adding some noise and effects to the voice message. Along with this we also added four rar files, one of which could be opened by solving a puzzle involving the previously mentioned hieroglyphs and some knowledge of the Cthulhu mythos. The first rar then contained a password to the next rar and so on. Each rar file also contained a text and image that would tease about the soon to come "Justine" add-on story. Unfortunately, pretty much nobody bothered about discussing these bits. Either people were too caught up in solving the puzzle (only seeing the texts and images as means to an end) or they were not that interested into solving the puzzle and did not pay attention to what was uncovered.


As we added these new stuff, especially the hieroglyph-related puzzle (that was written on a wall) and the encrypted note, I think that we might have disturbed the atmosphere a tiny bit too much. The encrypted note uses a cipher that could have been used in the 19th century, but still feels a bit out of place. The (hidden) writing on the wall is even worse as it does not really makes sense in the game's world. I think they did not interfere with many (if any?) people's experience in the end though. Still, it is worth thinking about the impact that this kind of stuff has on the normal game, even if it is just a for a limited time.

A few days later it was time to release update 3, which meant putting "Justine" online. As the ARG hint was unlocked by making a perfect run through the game, some precautions were put in. First of all, the maps and script files where compressed and encrypted, thus not allowing any editing or peeking. This together with some other safe-guards also ensured that the maps could not be chosen individually and needed to be played in the set order. Finally, some important assets like the game config and enemy files were given CRC checks to make sure they were not meddled with. Even so, someone figured out that enemies could be disabled by renaming their folder after the game was booted (when the CRC checks had been made). Tricky bastards...


With update 3 out and us having checked that it ran okay (we added some fixes the day after release), we could relax more and did not take as much part in the ARG as we had earlier. A few days later the jawaban crescendo part of the ARG started, where all the games taking part in the ARG needed to be played in order to awaken GLaDOS. It was really fun to see how our game's kafe went the slowest. People afraid to play = mission accomplished!

It has been great fun taking part in the Portal 2 ARG. Being on a project together with other indie devs and Valve, trying to figure out tricky riddles, lurking in IRC channels, etc, have all been awesome. Apart from all the jolly good fun, there have also been financial rewards to this. Amnesia sales alone went up a lot during the ARG, and we were on the Steam 20-top for quite a while. The first two days of income pretty much paid for all work put into the "Justine" add-on story. Now as the ARG and sale is over, our daily sales have almost doubled, so not only did we get boost during the event, it also had a lasting effect on people's awareness of Amnesia.

If you are interested in reading more about the puzzles that were part of Amnesia or any other game's updates for that matter, head over to the ARG Wiki.

Also make sure to check out the other postmortems written by some of the developers that took part in the event:

A jawaban note: For those that do not have Steam, "Justine" is coming... soon...and there will be surprises!FAST DOWNLOADads