They talk about how a failure turned into a success

Oct 12, 2011 20:31 GMT  ·  By

Speaking at the GDC Online event one of the leading developers at Valve revealed how a big mistake lead to one of the most interesting scenes in the puzzle platformer Portal 2.

Eric Wolpaw, who is the writer at Valve who was in charge of writing Portal 2, spoke about the original plans for the GLaDOS potato carrying sequence, saying, “We had envisioned it as this buddy cop thing, where you’d be together and you’d be bickering and it would be awesome.”

He added, “It honest to God did not occur to us that the buddy cop thing doesn’t work if one of you is quiet. It’s funny now, everybody’s laughing, but it was a true moment of incredible panic for us when we realized we’d painted ourselves into a corner.”

This has lead to the much praised sequence in the game that involved GLaDOS taking a trip in the past in order to discover her origin.

Valve has a long history with main characters that are not speaking at any point during the game, having delivered the archetype with Gordon Freeman, the protagonist of the Half-Life series, but the developers still has problems with communicating with the player while keeping their avatars quiet.

Wolpaw also talked about the rumors that Valve created and then cut a scene which involved a violent exchange between Cave Johnson, the founder of Aperture Science, and his assistant Carolyn.

The developer says that nothing like this has ever existed and that the team is very proud about how it has treated GLaDOS in Portal 2.

The game recently received more free levels for the cooperative side of the game and Valve has promised to deliver more content in the coming months.

The company has not commented on any future plans to merge the Portal and the Half-Life universes or about Episode 3.