10 Things You Didn't Know About Portal

6. Cave Johnson Was Originally Portal 2's Main Villain

Portal 2
Valve

J.K. Simmons' hilarious turn as maverick Aperture Founder and CEO Cave Johnson is one of the highlights of Portal 2, but did you know he was originally conceived as playing a larger role?

In the early stages of Portal 2's development, the game was to be set entirely in the 1950s, with GLaDOS entirely absent. The story focused on Cave Johnson transferring his consciousness into a computer (and regretting doing so).

It seems the original intention was to have Cave be the player character, but this later changed to have him be the player's sidekick who would morph into the game's main antagonist over the course of the story, similarly to the role played by Wheatley in the final game.

Playtesters, however, missed the snarky presence of GLaDOS, and the focus was shifted back to the sarcastic AI, with Cave taking on a smaller, but still important, role. It would have been interesting to see what this prequel version of Portal would have been like, particularly with the emphasis on exploring the history of Aperture Science before its downfall.

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Patch is a pop culture enthusiast and purveyor of puns. He writes about media in a vague attempt to justify the alarming amount of time he spends consuming it. Nobody's convinced... but nobody's told him that yet. He spends his spare time working on Portal 2: Desolation, an ambitious fan-made sequel to Valve's beloved puzzle games.