Gordon, why do you have an apple on your chest?
Lots and lots of Valve news lately and I think they made the right move by releasing this huge wave at us all at once.
Okay, so the first thing. February 25th-ish. First found on the Steam forums. With the Beta of the new Steam client were some OS X icons along with a dock icon. What does this mean? Well there was speculation. Some thought that it could just be a skin for Steam that Valve was working on. Others thought that maybe, just maybe they were making a version of Steam for Mac users? Crazy idea? Maybe, but I thought it was very likely. But my question was this, why would OS X icon’s appear in a client where they aren’t even being used yet ( whether in a skin or the Mac application) ? It could be because it’s beta and they are being a little lazy accident, but I think it is more likely that they wanted to get some hype going. An intentional leak, if you will. So I’m kinda excited at this point.
Then comes March 1st (so glad they didn’t do this a month later), and Valve’s game Portal got an update. I didn’t notice this myself as I haven’t used Steam or played any Valve games in a long time. But this update’s patch notes read this: “Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations.” That’s it. Nothing else. It obviously doesn’t make sense. People all over the internet banded together in IRC chats, Google Waves, and forums to solve this mystery that involved turning sound files into pictures, deciphering the meaning of those pictures, cracking md5 hashes, finding telephone numbers that end up being a modem for a BBS that linked to lots of images and creepy emails from a dead CEO. Well very very long (and still uncompleted) story short, turns out this is some viral marketing and ARG that Valve has set up to get the hype level rising even more. Hype for what though? Many suspected a sequel to Portal (which was confirmed only hours ago as of this writing), and other’s thought maybe the the third Episode of Half-Life 2. It was confirmed in Half-Life Episode 2 that the Portal and Half-Life stories are somehow intertwined. If you want to get the full account of what has been happening over the past few days, check out this Wiki that was set up by the people in the IRC. ALL the information is there and a lot of people, including myself have been working really hard on it to get everything archived. This Portal Puzzle Overview page will give you a summary of everything that has happened so far.
Okayy. So now while everyone is working on stuff for this ARG, Valve sends 6 different images to six different Gaming sites. What are these pictures of? Well take a look. They decided to take the not-subtle-at-all approach with these pictures. Valve has stated that these pictures are “In anticipation of an upcoming announcement from Valve.” and that it is coming “soon”. So as of right now, everyone is pumped. Valve did a great job at getting everyone excited. Right now everyone is happy, PC users, Mac users, and Portal/HL fans. Well done Valve.
Direct image links.
[ 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 ]
Theories
My theories? I think that Portal 2 and Half-Life 2 Episode 3 will be launched together at the same time, similar to the way Orange Box was. I also think that Episode 3 will delve into the relationship between Portal and Half-Life and finally reveal how the story lines intertwine. But my favorite theory is this, it will all be released for both PC and Mac at the same time, on the release date.
Anyways… I’m going to go play some Portal.