Half-Life's Lost Superweapon | The Borealis | Full Half-Life Lore

The Borealis is one of the biggest mysteries in the Half-Life universe. This vessel is said to hold a powerful secret that could aid The Resistance of humanity against the dominating Combine Empire.

Who created The Borealis? Why it was created, and how it could change the future of the fate humanity? In this episode, I explore the mystery of the Borealis in the shared Half-Life and Portal universes.

Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
00:54 The Creation
03:49 The Disappearance
05:44 GLaDOS & The Combine Invasion
07:31 Rediscovery
14:56 Legacy
16:09 The Development of The Borealis
19:31 Epistle 3
25:15 Closing Thoughts
26:26 Ending

Older Borealis Video

Epistle 3

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Standard Sources
Half-Life series playthrough research
Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar
Half-Life: Alyx Playthrough
Portal/ Half-Life Fandom

AUDIO USED
Half-Life 2 OST: Lab Practicum

#Borealis #Lore #HalfLife

[naidenyordanov]

An amazing video (as you usually do).
I do wanna say that the relaxing but mysterious voice you make/have make me really engage with what you are talking about.
I wanna comment the great editing you also make. It's really smooth and pleasing to the eye (synchronising with the great voice).
I do think that you are underrated.
Keep up the good work 👍

[Artcat]

Portal in Half Life lore:
*manufacturer of a highly important super weapon*
Half Life in Portal lore:
“Black Mesa can eat my bankrupt a-“

[thealandude]

Honestly just thinking about Glados keeping everything in check as the combine brings havok on the surface is chilling

[muddlewait]

It’s deeply ironic that Aperture lost the Borealis due to an aggressive release schedule when their utterly miraculous, fully functional unreleased Portal device is stuck in QA for literally decades

[kevinwaddle]

The Borealis is full of Cave Johnson's greatest achievement:
combustible lemons.

[SebasTian]

I like how humanity as a whole wasn't able to keep the combine out, but Aperture is untouched by them as a whole. Like holy crap, GLaDOS is the GOAT.

[shiftbutbad]

When I first played HL2 (as a child) my thoughts were "wtf we went from a lab to humanity's enslavement". Now that i understand the l o r e, it makes way more sense.

[marioman]

26:17 This clip of you straight up putting a magnum round through Magnusson's skull and Alyx just walking away made me have such a turn of emotions that I had to make a comment on it. This fairly serious tone throughout the whole video and then suddenly, BAM Magnusson just gets put down for no reason lol

[cavemanguy]

Honestly I am glad that they didn't have Gordon Freeman forgotten. Gordon Freeman is kinda meant to stay alive like forever.

[WardenWolf]

I have a suspicion for the meaning of the ending: the Borealis travels through time. It's entirely possible they completely undid the invasion, so it never even happened, and Gordon returned to a point in the future where he'd been all but forgotten, assumed lost in Black Mesa.

[fortyforty-seven]

it would be so cool to see glados fight the combine with the full force of aperture

[KantiDono]

Timeline bullshit theory: The timeline we see in the Half-Life games is the original timeline. Here, Aperture is operating normally, without Glados, up until the seven-hour war. The Combine detect the Borealis, which was still under development at that time, and assault the facility. To escape an alien threat they can't fight, the Aperture scientists board the Borealis and attempted to warp the entire ship. But due to the... unique nature of Aperture's teleportation technology, it not only moved itself from the space of the drydock it was in, but from time as well. This created an alternate timeline where the Borealis mysteriously vanished from Aperture in the 1970's, early into it's testing. The unexplained disappearance of an entire ship, and suggestions it was due to negligence, proved to be a large setback for Cave Johnson, who was already beginning to have financial trouble by then. This leads to the downfall of Aperture and their increasingly desperate research, which in turn led to the rise of Glados we know from the Portal series. Because the Borealis was not in Aperture anymore in this timeline when the seven-hour war happened, the Combine were much less interested in the facility, so Glados was able to keep them out and continue testing the portal gun.

Thus, all plot holes are closed, and both Epistle 3, and Portal 1/2, can coexist in the same(ish) universe.

[Yggdrasil]

I'm just intrigued how Aperture got an Ice Breaker into a 4000m deep dry dock...

[ephraimtimmerman]

"They can tunnel through from their universe, but once they're here they're dependent on local transportation" -Judith Mossman

[dgbrd]

for some reason i am obsessed with the 1950s-1970s facilities of aperture, it just feels like they are more interesting, and huge

[raptorjesus]

It's possible that the GLaDOS and 7 hour war timeline looks something like this:

The seven hour war begins, and the people at Aperature science (including Cave Johnson) find out.
Due to Caves condition his brain is incompatible to be turned into an AI, so to save her and protect the facility, he orders that Caroline be be put in instead.
GLaDOS now awaken she calculates that the danger of the scientists in Aperature being captured is too great and teleports the Borealis away, whilst simultaneously ensuring none of the scientists could be captured (By releasing the neuro toxin)
After "securing" the information in the facility, she prepares proper defenses to keep the combine out of it
Being confident that the combine is no longer a threat (Either due to the events of Epistle 3 or because the Combine just stopped trying to take the facility) she goes back to testing.

[theugliestbarnacle]

Can y’all imagine the chaos that would happen if somebody duel wielded the portal gun and gravity gun? Or just two people with each gun as a duo? They’d be unstoppable

[derramk]

Never considered that there were emancipation grids on the Boriealis. Now I just can't stop thinking about what would happen if you sent an emancipation grid through a portal.

And if that was the cause of the accident.

[DeathScepter]

i love it in how both Black Mesa and Aperture had bleed edge sciences as a major aspect of their experiments.

[Skyrionn]

If you enjoyed this! I would really appreciate it if you could leave a comment, a like, dislike - anything to show engagement to appease the algorithm gods!
- The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. -