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Potatopocalypse: Everything you need to know about Portal 2's ARG
Alex Tretrop
Well, I’m sure you’ve all heard by now that Valve is offering to release Portal 2 early, if enough people “contribute their CPUs” to reactivate GLaDOS by playing any of the games offered in the Potato Pack on Steam. It’s been one hell of an effective marketing ploy by Valve, and they’re one of the only companies I know that can get the community to band together for a common goal, while sharing the profits, not just with themselves but with the indie community as well. Let’s take an in-depth look at Valve’s latest ARG!
The Potato Pack
On April 1st, Steam put a Potato Pack up for sale with most people thinking it was a strange April Fools joke. It turned out to be much more complicated. A few Valve community members promptly set up a Potato Fools Day Wiki, with each suspecting it was one of Valve’s signature ARG’s (Alternate Reality Game).
Over the next few days, all of the games in the pack were updated with new levels or modes designed with a Portal twist. Killing Floor and The Ball have entire levels based in Aperture while others like Audiosurf have music sung by GLaDOS herself. Many of the games also contained hidden glyphs, text and even more potatoes, both in their respective levels and even in the real world.
Portal 2 Co-op Trailer
We need to go deeper…
Fast forward a few more days and users begin finding login screens to Aperture Science after completing specific tasks in some of these games. Each one asks for a password and after entering the correct one, downloads new content to your game, in the form of other password solutions for another Potato Sack game as well as some Portal 2 concept art.
This happened one more time on April 12th with some brand new log in screens, with some even leading to mp3 codes and messages. Crazy stuff.
While this was happening, you may have heard that bigger news outlets such as IGN, MacRumors or RPS recieving cryptic messages from Gabe Newell, the president of Valve. Each email contained a picture that was inverted and after each was collected and put together, it clearly showed a picture of a Bathysphere, as well as each of the file names being anagrams of the word “REBOOT PROCRESS,” suggesting that GLaDOS was restarting herself.
Interestingly, the numbers you see in that picture also form a pattern, which lead to the date that GLaDOS would begin rebooting as well as giving us another pattern corresponding with previously uncovered letters, giving us a message from inside Apperture. You can see more info here.
How you can Contribute!
This all lead to where we are now which, if you haven’t seen it yet, is the attempts to reboot GLaDOS. Successfully doing so will unlock Portal 2 on Steam early but it requires computing power to be given to our favourite homicidal computer by playing the indie games from the Potato Pack. As a nice side, you can still attempt to aquire the Potatoes hidden in each of the games, which will add a Potato icon next to your portrait on your community page. Aquire all 35 and you’ll receive a Golden Potato next to your portrait for your friends to… er, envy? If your feeling all alone in your quest for Potatoes you can aquire a “free” one by joining this Steam group (although you must have at least one of the games in the Potato Pack).
If your looking for some help on what you need to do to aquire that elusive golden potato, check out this for some help. The guys who run the fantastic Potato Fools Day Wiki have decided to systematically max out each and every game as a team, currently they are working on the 1… 2… 3… Kick It! and the next will be AaAaAA!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, so if you feel the need to contribute, play those! Also, for each Potato aquired in each game, it adds a multiplier to the amount of time you contribute to the overall power generated by your CPU. Awesome stuff, and I cant think of a better way to support indie development!
If you want some more to read on the subject, check out this wonderfullly detailed forum post by spitfire1945. The website that discovered most of this information is here. Finally, there is a far simpler in-character recap here for everyone who just wants to get a quick idea of what this is all about. Happy Potato Hunting!
