Portal Contents General Description [ 1.0 ] How To Play [ 2.0 ] Hints [ 3.0 ] Game History [ 4.0 ] Troubleshooting [ 5.0 ] [ 1.0 ] General Description Homer, a biological computer. The final link to the past and the only conduit to the future. But Homer is dying and access grows weaker moment by moment. Will you discover where everyone has gone or will the doorway to humanity close forever, leaving you totally alone? It is the distant future. The 21st Century has long since come and gone. Returning from a failed 100-year voyage to 61 Cygni, you reenter the earth's atmosphere to find that the world is not as you once knew it. Where once there was teeming humanity, now there is quiet. The empty shells of mile-high skyscrapers stand at rest in the awesome silence. The vista, nothing but forests and meadows, rivers and lakes, is beautiful but eerie, for there are no people... Finally, you discover an on-line computer terminal that you can operate. Through it you contact Homer, the ultimate achievement of man's technology -- A living computer. Together you and Homer must unravel the mystery of the vanished civilization before it's too late. If not, you face an eternity of total solitude. [ 2.0 ] How to Play Basics How to Start Enter your name and the game begins. Objective The goal of Portal is to discover the fate of humanity by working your way through computer files. In the upper left section of the screen is a scrolling window which allows you to see several icons for the 12 dataspaces. To begin the game, use the joystick to center this window on the icon representing Central Processing, which has a "CP" label on it. Press the joystick button to enter the dataspace. Once inside Central Processing, pull the joystick down to move your "cursor" to the menu bar along the bottom. Then, move the joystick to the right, until the "Help" button is selected. Press the joystick button to read help for further instructions. IMPORTANT NOTES 1) When you select the second icon from the right (the yellow HOMER MESSAGES icon), you will be presented with a message with white text on a blue screen. An inaccuracy occurs after you exit this screen, and takes the form of wrong text being displayed in the top section of the screen. This is a cosmetic bug only, and is easy to fix. Simply choose the EXIT TO INTERFACE icon, which is the rightmost icon on the bottom of the screen. This will take you to Portal's dataspace interface. This will NOT affect gameplay and you will be able to continue with the game as normal by pressing Enter or the joystick button to re- enter the dataspace. 2) The original Portal on the Commodore 64 used the "Data Crystals" within the game to save and load games. This has been disabled. To save and load games, you should use the File menu. Joystick The joystick can be used to navigate through the dataspaces, or to control options on the menu bar along the bottom of the screen. [ 3.0 ] Hints There is an order to the game -- that is, you must read certain pieces of information before new messages will appear in the dataspaces. At times, there will be messages that are not central to the story, but are side-plots that you can explore if you desire. Check with Homer frequently. Think of Portal as an interactive book, not as a game. Enjoy the story and plot. [ 4.0 ] Game History Brad Fregger, Producer The idea for Portal was born one day when "David Crane and I were having an argument. David said that 'in order for a game to work on a computer, it has to have some interactive gameplay. The player has to have a direct impact on what's happening. Literature, for example, would never work on a game.' Dragon's Lair, with it's really primitive branching, as far as most game designers were concerned, was awful. I argued that we could bring literature to the computer in a non-linear way that could be very exciting." The first step Brad took in creating Portal was to call San Jose State University and inquire about a writer to help him with a new computer game project. They referred him to Rob Swigart, a writing teacher who had a keen interest in non-linear literature. In fact, he had already written some non-linear works which were in a very "CyberPunk" futuristic theme. For Portal, Rob came up with the idea of an astronaut who went away, came back, discovered an empty planet, and explored the main computer system to find out what happened. Once the story was started, they needed a programmer. They found Gilman Louie and his company, Nexa. At the time, Nexa was a very young computer software company being run out of Gilman Louie's parents' home. "So we had the team. The original concept was mine, Rob wrote the story, and Gilman was the one who brought the life to Portal. It was Gilman who really created the look-and-feel, invented the 'dataspace' scheme, and so on. In the end, we found that we had developed a masterpiece that was way beyond anything done before." There were 2 sequels planned as follow-up in the same genre. Unfortunately Portal was not a huge commercial success, and it was decided that the sequels would not work, despite the fact that "Portal got more reviews than any other product that Activision made at the time." Rob Swigart, Author "I had written a few non-linear books, such as Little America. My writing is very influenced by Robert Altman, and when Brad [Fregger, Portal's Producer] called me about the idea for Portal, I thought it would be a tremendous opportunity and a lot of fun." The thing that draws Rob to the futuristic, non-linear genre is that it "moves around in both time and space, and makes linguistic connections to provide cohesiveness. A great example is Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5." Rob is currently working on a CD-ROM project and novel. He also works for the Institute for the Future, in the Emerging Technologies group. The institute, a non-profit think tank with its roots in the RAND corporation, specializes in tracking and forecasting technology, especially in the communications arena. [ 5.0 ] Troubleshooting How to Start Enter your name and the game begins. Portal Game Specific Notes To get started go into the CP folder and select help. This will help explain things. Most importantly, remember that Portal is more of an interactive novel than it is a game. IMPORTANT: When you select the second icon from the right (the yellow HOMER MESSAGES icon), you will be presented with a message with white text on a blue screen. An inaccuracy occurs after you exit this screen, and takes the form of wrong text being displayed in the top section of the screen. This is a cosmetic bug only, and is easy to fix. Simply choose the EXIT TO INTERFACE icon, which is the rightmost icon on the bottom of the screen. This will take you to Portal's dataspace interface. This will NOT affect gameplay and you will be able to continue with the game as normal by pressing Enter or the joystick button to re-enter the dataspace. ********* End of the Project 64 etext of the Portal help file. *********