I don't know what the phone company thought I was doing - it was permanently engaged. "It's one of the most surreal moments of my life, sitting next to this PC, listening to the modem. "This many multi-million dollar project: I helped announce it in a form a computer from the late 1980s could understand," he said. And with those you could work out an MD5 hash of a phone number - his phone number. Through Portal you'd go, accumulating "what looks like really noisy pictures from security cameras with numbers and letters in".
Portal 2 beta code code#
"Essentially one thing led to another and we ended up adding these radios to the first Portal - updating it over Steam - and you'd pick up a radio and it'd just be making some kind of noisy buzzing noise, just kind of radio interference, and you'd walk around in the world with this radio and you'd get to particular locations and you'd get a stronger signal, and you'd pick up say Morse code transmissions - this funny kind of warbling, beeping noise, flowscan." and on and on he went, presuming I understood. So when an opportunity arose for Valve to tease something in GameInformer magazine in 2010 that would get "extreme fans of Portal" excited, it was Adam Foster who raised his hand. It was the nature of his announcing his employment to Valve using an ARG that started him on the path of becoming Valve's go-to ARG person. "The first anyone had seen publicly of Portal 2 was relayed over this modem from 1987 from my kitchen."Īdam Foster landed a job at Valve in 2008 following his work on celebrated Half-Life 2 single-player add-on package Minerva: Metastasis, the story of which I delved into last week. "It had to be in my apartment because the Valve phone systems were too modern for this system," he explained, "and when people connected to this and put the right username and password in, it relayed ANSI art versions of Portal 2 artwork.
That phone number was Adam Foster's, he told me recently, and it was hooked up to an old BBS-capable PC with a modem from 1987, set up in his kitchen ( information super sleuths have dug up before). The last layer of a convoluted ARG conundrum gave people a landline number in Washington near Valve HQ.
Portal 2 beta code Patch#
In March 2010, Valve updated Portal with a mysterious patch that set fans on a trail of code-cracking and puzzle solving that ultimately led to the announcement of Portal 2.