Holy crap, I have been ridiculously busy this month. Between five brand-new Cracked articles that will be published starting next week, two new Mental Floss articles this month alone, my first piece for TopTenz.net, a screenplay, and some new secret projects that I will announce soon, I’ve had my work cut out for me. Good thing I’m on vacation next week.
As such, I hope you’ll all forgive my more-sporadic-than-usual updates over the last few weeks. I promise that I’m not just sitting around nude and eating entire containers of cookies any moreso than I usually am. I am actually getting things done, much as my wife and cat would like to believe otherwise. Anyway, nudity and cats should never mix, so I’m going to shut up now and get on with the post.
The Portal series is chock-full of weirdness (as Max Yezpitelok and I have established on two separate occasions), but there’s more insane stuff you never even got to see.
Spoilers for Portal 2 below! Why haven’t you played this game already, for fuck’s sake?
Hidden within the game’s script files is an eerie scene that would have occurred in the game’s Aperture Underground Labs sections. The player (and GLaDOS’ potato-self, naturally) would have come across a simple computer workstation sitting on the ground… which just happened to be the final resting place of Aperture Science CEO Cave Johnson, who is now insane. At least, more than he was before, that is.
As explained by Johnson himself, Caroline/GLaDOS was a test subject for the process of transferring a human consciousness into A.I. Presumably, Johnson never got the chance to get put into a robot body of his own because GLaDOS neurotoxin-ed the shit out of the facility, leaving him stuck on a single computer in an abandoned part of the lab.
Also keep in mind that Portal 2 happens some indeterminate time after the first game (which itself took place many years after GLaDOS being brought online), possibly hundreds or even thousands of years. Can you blame the guy for losing his shit?
To complete the scene, you were required to “kill” Johnson by unplugging his computer. (Because apparently you couldn’t just turn it back on?) The file also describes a “corpse”, seemingly implying that Johnson’s actual dead body could have been hooked into the machine as well, which makes the whole thing extra-unsettling.
Unfortunately, no other evidence of the scene still exists. No recorded dialogue, no props, nada. Maybe they decided it was too ignoble an end for Cave Johnson, who dies offscreen in the game (slightly more noble). Maybe they’re saving it for the sequel, where the disembodied CEO follows you around and you solve crimes together… wait, that was supposed to be a joke, but I think I’d actually play that.
Ahem. Dear Valve, I am ridiculous internet writer and I have a proposal for you…