Portal 2/Trivia

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• Actor Allusion:
  • Nolan North voices some defective turrets and personality cores. One of them, a manly action-hero wannabe who calls himelf "Rick The Adventure Sphere", is a clear nod to Nathan Drake, perhaps his most well known voice role.
  • Stephen Merchant, co-creator of The Office, voices Wheatley the Personality Sphere. The post-credits Stinger where Wheatley is drifting in space and confessing his remorse resembles a confession cam sequence from his show. Similarly, although Merchant didn't play the specific character being referenced, fans of The Office might find Wheatley's later characterisation -- an inept and incompetent boss whose vast delusion about his abilities is vastly undermined by the reality -- somewhat familiar.
  • A Dummied Out voice clip has Cave Johnson talking about a test that might give you the ability to excrete spider silk from your fingers -- something J.K. Simmons is quite familiar with.
• Artifact Title: almost happened.
• Ascended Fanon: This fan-made Aperture promotional video gets quoted word-for-word in the PeTI DLC by one of the alternate Caves (the computerised one.)
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Portal Kombat": The release date coincided with that of Mortal Kombat 9's; the temptation to switch out the "M" in "Mortal" for a "P" proved to be too great. It doesn't help matters that both Noob Saibot and Scorpion have fatalities involving creative use of portals, and the former's babality even involves portals.
  • Developer Nickname: PotatOS, as seen in the developer's commentary and the official soundtrack, "PotatOS Lament".
  • Before their names were confirmed, Atlas and P-body were known by their color schemes as Blue (Atlas) and Orange (P-body). They're still referred to in this way fairly often. GLaDOS also refers to them this way.
  • Some of the fanbase has taken to calling the Fact Sphere "Craig", due to him stating that the world's best name is Craig.
• Flip-Flop of God: Valve just can't seem to decide whether Caroline is really deleted, or if she's Chell's biological mother. This is caused mainly by lead writer Erick Wolpaw and GLaDOS' voice actress Ellen McLain having different ideas on which should be true, and both having some degree of creative control over the storyline.
  • For those wondering, there is more evidence to imply that Caroline is not Chell's biological mother, as Caroline would've hit menopause long before Chell was born. Whether or not Caroline is really deleted, though, is still up in the air.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The trailer for the Perpetual Testing Initiative contains (incredibly small and barely distinguishable) footage of Meet the Pyro.
• Hey, It's That Voice!!:
  • Both GLaDOS and the proper Turrets (as well as Caroline) are voiced by the same person as in Portal.
  • Stephen Merchant (writer of the original The Office) is Wheatley.
    • He's also in Hot Fuzz briefly as P.I. Staker...having problems with birds.
  • J.K. Simmons (J Jonah Jameson) is the voice of Aperture Science founder Cave Johnson.
    • He's also the professor in the Farmers Insurance commercials (Bum-ba-dum ba bum-bum-bum!)
  • Dee Bradley Baker voices the co-op bots.
  • Literally everything save for the Male Announcer and those above is played by Nolan North.
• Internet Counterattack: Relatively minor compared to most examples, but some people were not happy with the results of the Potato Sack contest on Steam, and wrote negative user reviews on Metacritic just for that.
• Preview Piggybacking: As part of the Potato ARG, Valve offered 13 indie games in a 'Potato Sack', in which players had to accumulate time on each of the games to get Portal 2 released early.
• Prop Recycling:
  • Two clipboards from the first game are reused without any change in design. One of them is the "Hazard Identification Card" which shows the icons for the first game's test chamber banners. This means that the clipboard's icons for the High-Energy Pellet and cake remain in the second game even though the Nostalgia Levels' test chamber banners have replaced the corresponding icons. The other clipboard is the Test Subject #234 clipboard located near the area where turrets are checked for defects.
  • In-universe, P-Body is a modified turret, while Atlas is a modified personality core.
• She Also Did: Most of the animation of Personality Cores was done by Karen Prell, AKA Red from Fraggle Rock.
• Sure Why Not: Red emancipation grills, originally from Portal: The Flash Version. The blue plasma walls are also similar to official Hard Light Bridges.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: Originally there was meant to be an additional audio recording in Portal 2 involving the event wherein Caroline was forced into the mind uploading despite her objections, but the scene was later cut. Since a few of Ellen McLain's lines in the said scene were left in the game files, numerous rumors began to circulate that either A) a rape scene initially present in the plot but later removed; or B) since the scene played out like a rape, several cast and crew members objected to it (including J.K. Simmons, who refused to record lines for the scene, hence the absence of his lines in the game files), which ultimately forced it to be cut. Despite the obvious contradiction of J.K. Simmons getting offended at acting in a rape scene despite doing one previously in Oz, Erik Wolpaw has had to confirm that these rumors are false. No comments have been made on the actual reason for the cutting of the scene.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A very early version of the game, based on an internal prototype called F-Stop, was supposed to be a full prequel to Portal, taking place decades before the main game and focusing on Aperture's origins, with a brand-new game mechanic that Valve absolutely loved - and without a single portal in sight. Testers, on the other hand, weren't so happy about the concept, insisting on having Chell, GlaDOS and the Portal Gun in the sequel.
  • Valve released short Aperture Science videos showcasing the various new gimmicks, including Aerial Faith Plates, the Gels, the Thermal Discouragement Beams, and the Pneumatic Diversity Vents. The last is completely absent in the final game. Although the player does travel through vents at several points, they're cutscenes, not a gameplay element.
  • Originally there were meant to be more personality cores the player would interact with apart from Wheatley. The audio commentary explains they scrapped them because there were too many, and there wasn't enough time to give each one a decent amount of characterization. Some of the cores got recycled as the cores you use to corrupt Wheatley during the final battle - notably, the Space Core, the Adventure Core, and the Fact Core.
  • Some unused dialogue found in the Portal 2 files suggests that Cave Johnson didn't die before being uploaded into a computer much like his Memo suggests. In fact he would have been stored in a cube similar to the companion cube and would be plugged into a wall. In order to get through to the next chamber you would need to disconnect and kill this cube In fact Cave begs for death saying "My life is torture, please kill me." You would also have to climb upon his dead/dying corpse to get to the next chamber.
  • Originally Wheatley had a different voice actor (Valve animator Richard Lord). Though still British and with similar dialogue, Wheatley seems like a very different character from how he is in the final game. You can checkout the original Wheatley here.
  • If Stephen Merchant turned to be unavailable, Valve were in talks to have Richard Ayoade - best known as Moss from The IT Crowd and Dean Learner/Thorton Reed from Garth Marenghi's Darkplace - play Wheatley instead.
  • The co-op mode was originally going to have another woman named Mel work alongside of Chell. She ended up being replaced by Atlas and P-body after someone pointed out that play testers tended to die a lot.
  • One of the gels was supposed to allow you to ignore gravity and walk up walls. It made playtesters sick. It was one of the three "paints" in the indie game "TAG - The Power of Paint", that inspired the gel mechanic. The other two, "Fast" and "Jump/Bounce", made their way in the game with the new Conversion Gel.
  • One player found that the Peer Review DLC secretly replaced the unused fourth gel with a new "Reflection Gel", which would reflect any lasers directed on to them similarly to a Redirection Cube. It was most likely cut because the cubes are far more versatile and flexible than the gel when it comes to devising puzzle solutions.
  • Cut sound clips seem to indicate that the original plan was not to have a separate announcer narrate the tests before GLaDOS's revival, but recordings of GLaDOS with the exact same lines. Notably, these lines bear a stronger resemblance to her lines from early on in the first game (i.e. more cold and robotic) than the rest of her lines, suggesting a sort of audio continuity.
  • According to The Final Hours of Portal 2, there were several different ideas for the ending, including one where Chell would say one word, "yes", to end the game, and another involving a duet between Chell and GLaDOS.
  • Portal 2 was going to be a game without portals.
  • In the script files for the game, there is a lot of unused dialogue, some of it pretty funny.
  • Greg was originally going to appear in the main single player campaign, but was scrapped when they didn't want to waste money to hire a new voice actor for only a couple lines, and instead had Ellen McLain voice Caroline.
  • The original concept for the game had Cave Johnson as a Villain Protagonist, no GLaDOS or Chell, and no portals. They figured they'd figure out the Non-Indicative Name problem later.