When Games Get Too Popular: The Portal Effect

What happens when a game gets so popular that the thing that made it popular is ruined?

Footage Used/Videos Mentioned:
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[WhaleMilk]

Hi, I promise I didn't misgender Leadhead! I've gotten a handful of comments correcting me on her pronouns, which I am fully aware of, I'm a huge fan of her work. When I do use her pronouns, I say it rather quickly, which can be heard as me saying "he" instead of "she" which I did not intend. While editing I thought it was pretty clear but apparently not! Won't fuck that up again. Have a wonderful day!

[brady]

I feel like this is very similar, if not exactly the same, to Star Wars. Knowing who Darth Vader is completely changes how people view the first two movies, and because “I am your father” is just such a common phrase no one can go into it blind

[spoookley]

portal is genuinely influential to the point of convincing you it’s not, which reminds me of when in high school we read beowulf & realizing that it wasn’t just a garbage story full of tropes, but it was instead the originator of the tropes we’ve become accustomed to

[icantthinkofanything]

I actually wasn’t even fully aware “the cake is a lie” was from Portal. So I experienced the game blind, but when I found the rat man room I was less unsettled and more amused because it was an “ohhh, THATS what that’s from” moment

[radical_rat]

I was a child when Portal came out, and had no exposure to the memes prior to playing it. While I do see the point with "The Cake is a Lie" being a spoiler that could recontextualize things, I don't think there was ever a point where I thought GLaDOS was good and helpful and these were perfectly reasonable tests to be doing. From the very beginning, you wake up confined in a tiny cell, freed at the whims of an obviously malfunctioning computer voice. The use of broken templates like "[SUBJECT NAME HERE] must be the pride of [SUBJECT HOMETOWN HERE]" that happen pretty early on indicate that GLaDOS is, at the very best, apathetic about you. Basically everything in the test chambers, from the portal gun to the emancipation grills to even the buttons are stated to have various degrees of injury and death as side effects, and the offer of Cake is absurd on the face of it, just as patronizing as everything else GLaDOS says.

You're treated like a rat stuck in a maze from the start, you never really think GLaDOS and Aperture Science have your best interests at heart, at least not if you're paying attention. The discovery of Ratman isn't the discovery that you've been lied to and trapped here against your will. It's the discovery that you aren't the only one. That at least one other person has been here before you. The existence of the dens, and perhaps more importantly your discovery of them, isn't evidence GLaDOS is evil. That was never in question. But it IS evidence that she isn't omniscient. That you don't have to play her game. That escape is, at least theoretically, possible.

[uselessshroob]

SPOILERS FOR Jekyll and Hyde :






Never forget that the twist end of the original Jekyll and Hyde book was that Jekyll and Hyde were the same person.

[alinayossimouse]

I remember Portal quite differently and I think that's really interesting. GLaDOS was suspicious to me from the start so I distrusted everything she said almost from the beginning. Maybe it is because I was already 23 when it came out. Regardless, I basically knew her promise of cake was clearly meant as a carrot on a stick for me as Chelle and still Portal's story and twists remain some of my favorites in modern gaming.

I'm honestly not sure if knowing the meme beforehand would have taken much away from my enjoyment, a lot of which came from submitting myself to the flow of the narrative despite knowing I was up against a voice that clearly didn't have my wellbeing in mind. The part with the fire chamber where we break out of the test chambers was still a surprise to me, I was excited to find out there was so much more game after the twist, and knowing the meme wouldn't have spoiled that.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think it's an unfair assessment that knowing "the cake is a lie" cuts Portal's effectiveness in half. In fact I think the story was designed in a way that a twist could be foreseen fairly early on and its strength is that the story is resilient to that and still enjoyable when you can anticipate lightbulb moments.

[Zahn-rad]

My favourite lightbulb moment came from Portal 2.

The trivial info about moon dust and then seeing "it" at the end.
In hindsight it's obvious but in that moment I instantly remembered that piece of trivia

[BleuSquid]

The "cake is a lie" meme has become so widespread that, to many, its origins have been lost. I recently got to watch someone experience Portal for the first time. They knew the phrase, but they had no idea it had any relationship to the game! It was only upon reading the phrase written in-game did it dawn on them. Their moment of revelation was at the same time as those of us who did play it truly blind, even if the characteristics of the revelation were different.

[lukethelazymachine]

I mean, it should be called 'The Vader Effect' since that is a much bigger example of what you're talking about

[diogo]

The cake is a lie was so big that I knew of it before I knew what Portal was

[DasJiggly]

Seeing this footage of someone putting the cube through the hole in the top of that wall, hurting themselves while doing so, instead of portalling the cube with themselves, but then busting out that backwards crouch bunnyhop really hurts my brain...

[Bonkava]

Doesn't the line "you will be baked, and then there will be cake" come before the ratman den?

[winteriris]

It's probably like the sans fight from undertale, the battle was been such an iconic moment but if you know killing all the monsters will lead to such a fight then it takes away a bit of the meaning. It was supposed to be a hidden consequence for the player's actions, the last ditch effort to make you stop playing the game.

I do love your videos a lot, I can't wait for more🙏

[xTonicWaterx]

I am 6 minutes into the game and this man has figured out 20 different ways of saying the cake is a lie was a meme and a spoiler

[LucisZ]

When portal one came out I was beginning HS. I didn’t know what Valve was but I knew the meme “the cake is a lie”. It was yelled everywhere for the next 4 years. I didn’t give any other thought to portal till many years later when my boyfriend at the time wanted to play the co-op mode in portal 2. I worked backwards from there. I do wonder if the meme is going to become so disconnected from the game portal it’s possible to circle back around and for a good percent of new people to have that completely blind experience back.

I think of it almost like sampling in music. Someone may like that new song just released that sampled but didn’t change a piece from 40-50 years ago. Food for thought

[JuanGamer]

I felt the same with minecraft, I watched soo many videos on my childhood that, when I first got the game on my PS3 I knew how to play and the core crafts for the tools, even tho I enjoyed every second of it I still didnt feel that pleasure of finding out what to do or how to get to the end and etc...

[brebmann]

Guy who only ‘recently’ played portal here.
I’m probably not unique but in 2017 I had only heard that portal was a super great game, knew absolutely nothing about it because I wasn’t on that side of the internet much, and then played the game in one sitting back in 2017. I distinctly remember being apprehensive about all the turrets, death water, and overall dingy feel of the tests throughout the first part of the game. What really set me off was never seeing anyone observing me during the tests, and it gave a sort of backrooms vibe (the term backrooms had only barely been coined at the time). I was already set off since the game started off as a “he woke up in a room one day” kind of feel. Then I got into the rat people cave drawing spaces where I finally saw that phrase, no kidding, for the very first time: the cake is a lie. I remember being immediately suspicious of glados after that but I wasn’t 100% convinced of anything until the last couple levels when she kept building up the party that was about to happen. I also remember being absolutely floored at the second half of the game, going around catwalks and all that. I truly wasn’t expecting that part at all and I immediately thought to myself: “I didn’t sign up for a horror game!”
So I can say in my experience that yes, the twist of Portal really was as good as the creators intended, in the same way that Star Wars, Fight Club, the Shawshank redemption, the Prestige, and Shutter Island are all still fantastic movies.

[grayanddevpdx]

I feel like Undertale got hit REALLY hard by the Portal effect. The Mercy button, resets being canon, the multiple routes, Flowey’s backstory, all the Genocide fights, and basically anything else in the game now seems so normal for something that had basically never been done before.
Everyone knows that Flowey is the central antagonist of the game now, but at the time the twist was a massive part of making it clear the game would be different from other RPGs.
Everyone knows about the Sans fight, but at the time people were shocked that grinding too hard starts an incredibly difficult fight with a character who, outside of a few lines of dialogue, was exclusively comic relief.
Luckily, unlike Portal, the original shock of the twists are at least still mentioned, but with time people will likely forget what it was ever like to play it for the first time.

[InkAirplane]

Very interesting to see this applied to Portal, as I feel that a similar effect happened to Undertale. I was one of the very few lucky people who managed to experience Undertale totally blind with no knowledge of the ending mechanics of different routes. So I did a full 'neutral' run before realising I could have saved Toriel, Papyrus and others. Reset, and got the Pacifist ending. I feel l got a unique experience going through that game blind, whereas I think it's impossible to experience that with undertale now due to it's popularity.