I’ve been getting comments and messages from people asking why we didn’t mention anything about Portal 2 in today’s article, specifically about the reveal that GLaDOS actually is a trapped woman, of sorts. There’s a few reasons:
1) We wrote the article about a month ago, before Portal 2 was even out.
2) It’d kind of kill the article for people who hadn’t played the game yet. (They’d have to duck out at the spoiler warning, like I imagine people will do for this blog post.)
3) It apparently wasn’t actually intentional.
On that third point, I’ve been playing Portal 2 with commentary on (which is how I found out that GLaDOS’s model in the first game was based on Venus, plus it’s just fun and interesting) and in the underground Aperture Labs levels, there’s actually a node that specifically mentions that Caroline and GLaDOS’s backstory came later in Portal 2’s development. (It’s right at the beginning of chapter 7. It’s seriously right out of the gate.) Originally, Cave Johnson’s assistant was a pitiable scientist named Greg, but they didn’t want to hire a new actor just for a couple of lines. So, they changed Greg into Caroline, had Ellen McLain (GLaDOS’s voice actress) do the lines, and that’s when they realized that it made a good hook into GLaDOS’s backstory.
Here’s a screenshot of what it says:
Seems like it was just one of those happy accidents. Still, though, it’s pretty fucking rad that it worked out that way.
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