Before Portal 2Portal was the spiritual successor to a Digipen graduate's Narbacular Drop project. A game starring Princess NoKnees, a young girl unable to jump who attempts to escape an elaborate dungeon using dimensional doors to navigate through the dungeon's gauntlets and mazes. Once Valve saw the game's footage, they hired the team that created Narbacular Drop. to play a game like this for them. With some major aesthetic changes and help from the Half-Life 2 engine, Portal was forged. Valve is a well-known game development company that has created games like Half-Life, Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, and Left 4 Dead. These games have a whole community behind them. They have these weird standards for releasing games. Where the Half-Life sequel took a long time to make, scrapped and remade. A game like Left 4 Dead 2 was added almost instantly. At the time, they created a package that released Half-Life2, its expansions, Team Fortress 2 and the new portal added to consoles as well as PC. Portal allows players to literally jump through hoops as they solve puzzles in potentially deadly gauntlets to outwit all-knowing AI and escape its laboratory of "tests" and deadly traps set in the relentless pursuit of science. You use portals instead of doors to navigate the laboratory's dangerous and deadly puzzles. It's more of a puzzle game, but from a first-person perspective. The game gives you a handheld portal device, or portal gun, that operates without ammo and does not fire bullets, rockets, or lasers of mass destruction. The portal gun fires holes, quantum space holes actually, which, if targeted at qualified surfaces, literally produce a loophole from where you fire a portal, all the way to... middle of paper ......portals to use and I'm sort of forced to explore and absorb the environment. It's a wonderful game to play, but don't expect it to keep you up at night. Wait a minute. I was just told that puzzles are not games. This means I wrote an article about a puzzle.Drat!Works CitedValve Official Portal 2 Website- Blog Updated September 30, 2011 Accessed October 3, 2011http://www.thinkwithportals.com/blog.phpThe Orange BoxPortal 2John Funk, “Portal Has A New End” escapistmagazine.com March 3, 2010 web. October 3, 2011The Escapist: Video Gallery: Zero Punctuation: Portal 2http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-uccion/3153-Portal-2Andy Chalk “The Portal Writer, Enough Cake” escapistmagazine.com June 18, 2010 the web. October 3, 2011http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/101476-Portal-2-Writer-Enough-With-the-Cake-Jokes-Already