When a trusted friend of mine would go on extolling the first game's virtues to me as if he were a disciple quoting scripture, I would always argue against him. I only believed in the arguments I made partially. For the most part, I just enjoyed being the devil's advocate. Challenging people's viewpoints often leads to learning and just as often (or even more so) to them being pissed off, both of which are good fun.
Truth be told, I wasn't just playing the role of devil's advocate. I had some issues with the first Portal for sure. No issues that ruined the game for me or kept me from thinking it was one of the most enjoyable games that year, mind you. But I had my gripes. I kept them to myself mostly. There was such a positive and optimistic spirit in the community of gamers that congealed around it and I didn't want to ruin that with what I saw as my own critical over-reactions.
After all, its rare in gaming for a game to come along that everyone seems to love TOGETHER as a unified community, sans all the fanboy, flamewar bullshit that clogs up most popular gaming forums. As the subset of people known as "gamers" continues to diversify, such universally enjoyable works will continue to become more scarce. Who wants to be the guy who walks up to a 12 year old SDCC show goer with a plushie companion cube strapped to their back to tell them you think their favorite game is an overrated tech demo? I sure don't.
The truth is we need more Portals, which is to say we need more out of the blue games from optimistic, passionate newcomers that get financed by forward thinking publishers and end up becoming runaway successes that engender love and enthusiasm in the people who play them. Why rain on the parade when it feels so much better to march along with it?
That sentiment changed for me while attending New York Comic-Con (NYCC) in 2010. I was attending a panel whose purpose was to make a definitive list of the 10 greatest games of all time. The process was interesting. It began with one panelist creating their list. Then the list gets passed along to the next panelist, who could then either swap the positions of two games already on the list, or take a game off the list entirely and replace it with one of their choosing. The games on the list are irrelevant to this post. About halfway through the panel, one of the panelists removed a game from the list and replaced it with Portal and was practically met with a standing ovation from the audience.
I remained seated.
The only other panelist decision met with close to that level of approval by the audience was when a panelist removed a Madden game that had snuck on there and replaced it with Earthbound. I hope that helps paint a clearer picture of just how much this crowd approved of the notion that Portal is in the same echelon as Super Metroid, Tetris and Starcraft. I was truly stunned. Not only was I unable to fathom how someone over the age of 18 could put Portal on a list of the ten greatest games of all time, I was blindsided by how unanimously this opinion was accepted. That is when I realized that Portal was, as it turns out, a pretty big deal.
At this point, despite truly loving Portal, I felt the need to step out of the parade. In a future post I will go into more detail about the grievances I had with Portal. I wanted to see it as the revolutionary game-changer my fellow enthusiasts believed it to be, I really did. I even replayed it to see if my experience with it would change for the better if I understood it's shortcomings going in. To my sincere dismay, it didn't. My feelings about Portal proved impossible to change.
And then I played a little game called Portal 2.
Now, to be clear, I am not ready to put Portal 1 or 2 on my top ten of all time list. I probably never will. But I must admit that playing Portal 2 has totally changed the way I feel about Portal as a whole. It has even cast the original in a fairer light for me, which may sound kind of preposterous, but is true just the same. Not only is Portal 2 a better game than its predecessor, but it completes it in crucial ways by giving it a context that I felt it lacked. My experience with it has left me to ponder many things, ranging from the magic of sound design to the nature of power, art and sentience.
I am hoping to share some of those musings in this blog in the coming weeks. Regardless of the validity or specific nature of these thoughts, the fact remains that Portal, as a property, has ignited them in me. In my book that is certainly a big deal, maybe even big enough for me to step back in line with that parade and start marching again.
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