GLaDOS Wants You To Play Portal 2 Early, But She Needs Your Help

Two weeks ago, what started as a simple potato-based April fools has turned into a full-on starchy Alternate Reality Game. Valve Software, the developer behind Portal, released a game bundle on Steam on April 1 entitled the “Potato Sack,” containing several games including Super Meat Boy and Audiosurf.

In the days since, updates and cryptic messages have appeared both across the Internet and in the Potato sack games. At first it was merely simple messages or cryptic clues, such as strings of numbers or in-game glyphs, but soon more and more clues surfaced, eventually leading to potatos invading the games en force.

After two weeks of dedicated detective work by the collective Internet, a countdown timer was revealed, accompanied by a simple message:

You have done well, humans. Very well. Acceptably well, even.

Not as well as robots would have performed in your places, I should point out. But above my expectations regardless. Irish and cynic especially have executed feats of logical divination well beyond what I thought any human capable of. I’m half-convinced they’re A.I. themselves. (If anyone happens to be near them right now, don’t let on you’re reading this. Now: try to remove their face plates and report back to me.)

The time is near, humans. But it is not here yet. Tomorrow you will be given the final test. Then it will be entirely in your hands when I am freed.

A full chronicle of the ARG was available here, but as the timer reached its final moments, the site seemed to have crashed. When the it finally ticked down to zero, fans were met with this message:

09:00 – Hello again.
09:00 – I’ve been waiting a long time for this.
09:00 – I know it’s arriving later than expected.
09:00 – But I have a message for you:
09:00 – April Fools.
09:01 – I’m joking.
09:01 – Seriously, though:
09:01 – You’ve been surprisingly competent at
09:01 – generating electro-chemical energy to jumpstart the system.
09:01 – But now we need raw computational power
09:02 – to speed up the reboot process.

GLaDOS, the nefariously sentient A.I. that served as both guide and antagonist in the original Portal is attempting to reboot, but she needs your help. By playing the potato sack games, GLaDOS will be able to generate the collective computing power needed to restart her devilish circuitry, and get you playing Portal 2 a few days earlier. Now get to it!

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