10 Things You Didn't Know About Portal

2. Portal 2's Scrapped Ending Had Chell SPEAKING

Portal 2
Valve

The climactic boss fight at the end of Portal 2 sees Chell facing off against the moronic Wheatley, who has taken control of the facility and plunged Aperture into chaos.

At the apex of the fight, Chell goes to press the stalemate resolution button to put GLaDOS back in charge, but is blasted away by Wheatley's booby-trap. She then cannily shoots a Portal onto the surface of the moon, flinging Wheatley into the vacuum of space. It's sheer lunar-cy.

Originally, however, there was a different resolution to the fight planned. Following Wheatley's booby-trap, the announcer would dictate that the stalemate button had been destroyed and the transfer procedure would be halted "unless a stalemate associate can say the word 'yes'". At this point, the famously silent protagonist Chell would utter her first word: "YES!", and the boss battle would be over.

While this would have made for a funny ending in theory, it apparently left playtesters a little underwhelmed in practice, feeling like a bit of an anti-climax after the excitement of the boss battle.

Leaving Chell silent throughout may be less subversive, but it works a lot better to ground the player in the world and immerse them in the character, so it was ultimately the right decision.

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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.