Portal 2 Fans Send Valve Real Potatoes
It looks like GLADoS is powered by potatoes and those crazy valve fans have decided to help get her powered up faster to aid bringing the release date of Portal 2 forward by sending real potatoes to Valves HQ (and marking them for the attention of GLADoS) via Amazon:
Lets Send Valve REAL Potatoes - Steam Users' Forums
Oh those crazy gamers!
Where did all this potato stuff come from? I mean is there a site or something?
I like Kung-Fu.
It's too ridiculously deep to even get into. I'll try anyway. You can read about it on the Valve PotatoFoolsDay ARG Wiki - Valve ARG.Originally Posted by DMKA
Basically Vavle put up a bundle of indie games called The Potato Sack on Steam. They had some clever potato themed stuff added to them, but as subsequent updates were added, some of the stuff got Portal themed. GlaDOS showed up in several of the games and a deeper puzzle emerged.
Gabe Newell send out emails to several different gaming sites. Each one had a weird picture on it. Combined they were used as part of a puzzle. Emails from Gabe Newell - Valve ARG
Decoding the numbers across all of them had a message
Taking out the number-for-letter bits signified something about the release date being moved... or so people though.Code:+-------+------+-------+ | i rel | e4se | d/ 'k | // i released 'kick | ick 1 | t' a | head | // it' ahead | of sc | hedu | le. t | // of schedule. | hat w | as a | test | // that was a test. | . my | 9oal | / is | // my goal is | 2 ema | ncip | ate s | // to emancipate | 0meth | 1ng | else | // something else | early | . bu | t the | // early. but | y're | on t | o me. | // they're on to me. +-------+------+-------+ | the | syst | am 1s | // the system is | _ in | lock | down. | // in lockdown. | i s7 | ill | have | // i still have | acces | s to | thir | // access to thirteen | teen | off- | site | // off-site | chamb | ers | and A | // chambers and | M= in | st4l | llin/ | // am installing | a te | st 1 | n eac | // a test in each | h one | . i | am go | // one. I am +-------+------+-------+ | ing t | o ne | ed a | // going to need a | lot m | ore | test | // lot more test | 5ubje | cts/ | 2 m0 | // subjects to move | ve fo | rwar | d. wa | // forward. Waiting | 1t1_n | 9 an | d AM | // and am | expec | ting | imme | // expecting | diate | com | plian | // immediate compliance. | ce. | | | | | | | // hidden message is "4/19/2011_7AM=4/15/2011_9AM"
There were further updates to The Potato Sack games. They had ridiculously deep puzzles all interconnected. At the same time, some ARG (Alternate Reality Game) stuff was going on in the background with people who purportedly worked for Aperture Science.
Following really obscure clues and doing something crazy in the indie games got you to a login page for Aperture Science. You would need a password from some other ridiculously obscure source to get in. Eventually people figured them all out.
You got a potato added to you Steam profile for doing this.
This also prompted what was basically a DLC update to the game and allowed for you to get more potatoes and to get audio messages (with subtle hints) from GlaDOS.
When the April 15th countdown timer hit 0:00, we found a page where GlaDOS was trying to reboot early but needed help. GLaDOS@Home distributed computational grid status
Playing the games adds to the bars and completing a bar cuts time off of the release. As people get more potatoes in their games, they increase the multiplier, speeding progress of the other bars.
I don't think you can wrap your mind around the depth of some of this stuff. It's almost unbelievable. Some examples:
One of the vlogs of the fake people just happened to have a song playing in the background. Some figured out the chords, the notes in those chords, made a chart assigning numeric values to the notes (based on where they are musically in the scale), did the same for their relative minors and for how many beats each chord played. When put in a chart this way, they could be deciphered into a sentence that said something like "Help me! She's killing me!"
Some of the audio files could be viewed as wave forms, and, if you viewed the right way the, the wave forms would actually make out sentences.
One hint suggested a location in the Netherlands. A guy climbed a pole to the second story of a building to get pictures of glyphs that had been taped there (more hints).
What's more crazy is that someone filmed him doing it without his knowledge and posted it on the internet. People noticed that, in the video, a van drove past in the foreground and it happened to have even more glyphs on it to add to the clues.
This **** gets really really deep. It's the most amazing ARG I've ever seen and it just blows my mind, but most of it is well beyond my skill. Now that I've gotten all 36 potatoes from the games (with a guide), it blows my mind that people were able to figure out some of this stuff before there was a guide. It's truly amazing.
Incidentally, if you take the words "Portal Two" and remove R, L and W, it spells potato.
Also, the concept of the potatoes is that they can generate little amounts of electricity (maybe you did that experiment in HS to power a watch or something). So getting potatoes was GlaDOS's little ploy to make you help her come back online.
Now she's having people run the games to leech CPU power from them. That's the concept anyway.
In the end, the game might be released a day earlier at best, but it's fun as a concept and I've really been enjoying it.
Also, getting all 36 potatoes is supposed to net you something special, but if you haven't started, I wouldn't even try at this point. I used all day Friday and Saturday as well as this morning to get all of mine and it was very hardcore.
That...is amazing.It's too ridiculously deep to even get into. I'll try anyway. You can read about it on the Valve PotatoFoolsDay ARG Wiki - Valve ARG.
Basically Vavle put up a bundle of indie games called The Potato Sack on Steam. They had some clever potato themed stuff added to them, but as subsequent updates were added, some of the stuff got Portal themed. GlaDOS showed up in several of the games and a deeper puzzle emerged.
Gabe Newell send out emails to several different gaming sites. Each one had a weird picture on it. Combined they were used as part of a puzzle. Emails from Gabe Newell - Valve ARG
Decoding the numbers across all of them had a message
Taking out the number-for-letter bits signified something about the release date being moved... or so people though.Code:+-------+------+-------+ | i rel | e4se | d/ 'k | // i released 'kick | ick 1 | t' a | head | // it' ahead | of sc | hedu | le. t | // of schedule. | hat w | as a | test | // that was a test. | . my | 9oal | / is | // my goal is | 2 ema | ncip | ate s | // to emancipate | 0meth | 1ng | else | // something else | early | . bu | t the | // early. but | y're | on t | o me. | // they're on to me. +-------+------+-------+ | the | syst | am 1s | // the system is | _ in | lock | down. | // in lockdown. | i s7 | ill | have | // i still have | acces | s to | thir | // access to thirteen | teen | off- | site | // off-site | chamb | ers | and A | // chambers and | M= in | st4l | llin/ | // am installing | a te | st 1 | n eac | // a test in each | h one | . i | am go | // one. I am +-------+------+-------+ | ing t | o ne | ed a | // going to need a | lot m | ore | test | // lot more test | 5ubje | cts/ | 2 m0 | // subjects to move | ve fo | rwar | d. wa | // forward. Waiting | 1t1_n | 9 an | d AM | // and am | expec | ting | imme | // expecting | diate | com | plian | // immediate compliance. | ce. | | | | | | | // hidden message is "4/19/2011_7AM=4/15/2011_9AM"
There were further updates to The Potato Sack games. They had ridiculously deep puzzles all interconnected. At the same time, some ARG (Alternate Reality Game) stuff was going on in the background with people who purportedly worked for Aperture Science.
Following really obscure clues and doing something crazy in the indie games got you to a login page for Aperture Science. You would need a password from some other ridiculously obscure source to get in. Eventually people figured them all out.
You got a potato added to you Steam profile for doing this.
This also prompted what was basically a DLC update to the game and allowed for you to get more potatoes and to get audio messages (with subtle hints) from GlaDOS.
When the April 15th countdown timer hit 0:00, we found a page where GlaDOS was trying to reboot early but needed help. GLaDOS@Home distributed computational grid status
Playing the games adds to the bars and completing a bar cuts time off of the release. As people get more potatoes in their games, they increase the multiplier, speeding progress of the other bars.
I don't think you can wrap your mind around the depth of some of this stuff. It's almost unbelievable. Some examples:
One of the vlogs of the fake people just happened to have a song playing in the background. Some figured out the chords, the notes in those chords, made a chart assigning numeric values to the notes (based on where they are musically in the scale), did the same for their relative minors and for how many beats each chord played. When put in a chart this way, they could be deciphered into a sentence that said something like "Help me! She's killing me!"
Some of the audio files could be viewed as wave forms, and, if you viewed the right way the, the wave forms would actually make out sentences.
One hint suggested a location in the Netherlands. A guy climbed a pole to the second story of a building to get pictures of glyphs that had been taped there (more hints).
What's more crazy is that someone filmed him doing it without his knowledge and posted it on the internet. People noticed that, in the video, a van drove past in the foreground and it happened to have even more glyphs on it to add to the clues.
This **** gets really really deep. It's the most amazing ARG I've ever seen and it just blows my mind, but most of it is well beyond my skill. Now that I've gotten all 36 potatoes from the games (with a guide), it blows my mind that people were able to figure out some of this stuff before there was a guide. It's truly amazing.
Incidentally, if you take the words "Portal Two" and remove R, L and W, it spells potato.
Also, the concept of the potatoes is that they can generate little amounts of electricity (maybe you did that experiment in HS to power a watch or something). So getting potatoes was GlaDOS's little ploy to make you help her come back online.
Now she's having people run the games to leech CPU power from them. That's the concept anyway.
In the end, the game might be released a day earlier at best, but it's fun as a concept and I've really been enjoying it.
Also, getting all 36 potatoes is supposed to net you something special, but if you haven't started, I wouldn't even try at this point. I used all day Friday and Saturday as well as this morning to get all of mine and it was very hardcore.
I don't even have the words to express how mesmerized I am by all this.
I like Kung-Fu.
Yearg, that is the coolest thing I have ever read.
*sends potatoes*
I was following really close early on, but so much of it goes over my head. Occasionally, I'd read something that would just make my mouth hang open. Stuff like subtly placed braille all over certain levels of games that someone just happened to recognize and decode. The music one was nuts. The fact that someone went and found the actual bathysphere from the original e-mails and live-streamed some of it.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions.
While all of The Potato Sack games weren't stellar, the unique humor of GlaDOS was transferred amazingly well into those games and it's creepy hearing her voice. It was especially amazing in The Ball and Defense Grid where she has a good deal of dialogue. The part in The Ball was really great because it includes 7 test chambers that you have to do with the ball as well as cubes and she's jeering you the whole way in her normal fashion.
Holy crap, Yearg. I too am utterly amazed at people were able to decipher those incredibly intricate puzzles. That's insane.
The wonders of the internet. No matter the puzzle, someone, somewhere, can figure it out.
That's pretty awesome. I wonder if Valve set it up to have someone film that guy climbing the building so the van would be seen. Freakin' amazing.
streme Wheelie
Recognized Member
This is what games need to do. Generate some smurfing awesome real world
Yeah, it basically had to be that way. I think he was filming bits of it himself from his phone, but obviously that's sort of first person. It was a bit later that another video was uploaded to the internet in good quality.
Someone had to wait there across the street without attracting too much attention, find a guy looking at the pole (thinking of climbing it), start filming, cue the van to drive across... etc.
It may be a while before anyone sees this, but I checked the GlaDOS@home site just now and the potato's are counting down. If they keep going at the rate they're going they'll hit 0 in about 10 hours unless I screwed up the math. If only I weren't going to be asleep 10 hours from now so I coud see what happens.
All I know is that I want to play this game with Danielle. I should probably play the first one at some point, though. But I've already spoiled the whole thing for myself. Still worth playing it?
Bow before the mighty Javoo!
Yes, the puzzles are the thing to play for!
Add to the fact that I just played through the entire first game in about 2 hours goofing around, it's definitely worth playing through and won't take very long to do.Yes, the puzzles are the thing to play for!
THE JACKEL
add me, PSN: ljkkjlcm9
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