A place to post for the college modules.

How do you promote a sequel to an award winning multi platform game? Simple ask valve. Portal recently saw a small patch that encourages gamers to go back and play the original.

Now with an ever growing, several hundred page thread on the Steam forum regarding the update, Portal 2 has become one of the most anticipated sequels with one of the most innovative marketing stratergies seen in the games industry. Developers should take note.

So recently there was a mysterious update on Steam regarding Valve’s Portal simply called:

Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations

This update was sneakily added, with the community (myself included) not knowing and quickly wondering, what it was. Shortly after the patch whilst playing Portal it became apparent an unusual update had been applied.

The Radios/Encoded Messages

A radio had made a hidden appearance in each Portal level which were found to be transmitting distorted noise until they were moved to a specific spot in each level, once here they spill out what seems to be morse code.

These radios only appear after you’ve completed the campaign and it was discovered that you can decode some of them using SSTV, a program used to turn sounds into images, and there are 26 total radio transmissions; codenamed Dinosaur

Once you find all the radios and take them to the right spot you get this achievement, named Transmission Received

The people on the steam forums went through every level collecting the morse code and deciphering it. Here is one example of what was found:

Dinosaur 17

BEEP BEEEEP BEEP BEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEP BEEEEP BEEP BEEP
Which if interpreted as morse code becomes:
.-.. — .-..
Which translates to:

LOL

However, it gets weirder. If you destroy a radio this creepy sound clip plays:

Which says ‘Get out of here’.

When users collected all of these Morse Code messages together it sounds like Glados is rebooting.

Images in the Game Files

A bunch of encrypted WAV files were added to the game files, people used an SSTV program to convert them into pictures and found them all to be really strange images relating to the portal & Half Life.

Furthermore, several of these images have been linked to the Appolo Program:

BBS Files

Guys then found a phone number hidden in these pictures. All the numbers and letters in the pictures are part of an MD5 hash (a type of encoding), when decoded they translate to a phone number.

From Shack News:

Internet sleuths uncovered in the images an encrypted number which turned out to be a phone number from Kirkland, Washington–the city where Valve was founded. The telephone number connects to a bulletin board system; a pre-Internet dial-up system used for everything from chat to games – masquerading as a GLaDOS system.

On this system they found a bunch of crazy ASCI pictures, like these:

The above picture is an enhanced snippet, the bigger picture can be viewed Unenhanced & Enhanced.

There are numerous theories of what the pictures might mean, like these

You can read them in the shack news article

Update #2

Another update has been added, the description being: Added valuable asset retrieval. Two Wav clips named dinosaur_fizzle2 and dinosaur_fizzle3 have been added. The audio files both short in lengthl similar to the one shown above and it is unclear what is being said in these clips at the moment.

Portal now has a different ending, showing you being dragged off by a robot which says Thank you for assuming the party escort submission position

I couldn’t summerise the achievement of all of  the users combined imput better:

” What amazes me though is the ability of all the combined knowledge of everyone on the Steam forums to get together and figure this stuff out, in a several hundred page thread in a matter of minutes. “

Check out the ever growing 500 page Steam forum for more info

It was shortly after these updates Valve officially announced Portal 2.