Portal: Prelude Has Been Launched

Portal has been a huge hit and quickly became a cult favorite with the large gaming community. Its simple gameplay and often difficult puzzles made us rethink the way games are played. With the game having only two characters, the player and the computer AI, dubbed GlaDOS, it really brought a touch of simplicity to the way games are designed. It sparked the birth of popular slogans like “The cake is a lie” or the addictive song “Still Alive”.

With such a strong movement supporting the game, an independent modder decided to create a new map pack in order to complement the relatively short single player campaign and the absence of a multiplayer one. Thus, the modder decided to create a story behind these maps which would act like a prequel to the action in the original game. Although Valve have announced that an official prequel is currently under development, the community didn't back down and now, it is finally done.

Portal: Prelude, as it is entitled, will take us into the well known Aperture Science test rooms where the subjects are being examined by real people before the GlaDOS system was put in place. After nine months of hard work, the results are finally here, a complete game with 19 test chambers and a final level which is sure to test players to their limits.

A year after the launch of The Orange Box, the package which included the original Portal game along with Half Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2, Portal: Prelude is released. You can check out the game at its official site and can download it from there.

All you need in order to play this game is to have Valve's digital content distribution service, Steam, installed and have a copy of the original Portal game also installed on your PC. It's really nice that the community can develop such good games and not let Valve do all the work; after all, the more versions on the prequel of Portal, the better.

Valve's leading digital content distribution network, would start hosting mods developed by the community. These are modifications made to games, which use the
engine of the title to create new gameplay modes with the same or different characters. Such was the case with Counter Strike, one of the most popular FPS (first person shooter) games out there, developed as a mod to the very popular Half Life. Now, as an even greater token of appreciation, Valve will be offering five free mods to the customers who already own a Source-based game.

The five mods are: Age of Chivalry, D.I.P.R.I.P., Insurgency, Synergy, and Zombie Panic. All great mods, which just goes to show that this is the reason Valve is so popular in the gaming community. As another special offer, the publisher is selling Half Life 2: Episode 1 for the extremely low price of 5 dollars.

“Valve has been supporting the MOD community since the company's inception, offering updates to the SDK, holding MOD Expos and being the first to bring a MOD to retail with Counter-Strike in November 2000," said Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing at Valve. "The debut of these MODs on Steam marks the beginning of a new level of support for the MOD community by putting the leading MODs at the finger tips of over 15 million targeted gamers.”

Such initiatives should really be embraced by other game developers and publishers. I'm sure that a lot of talented modders can express their creativity by modifying a game to suit their ideas, and who knows, might just get the attention of a big company. Such was the case with the guys behind Counter Strike who were employed by Valve to develop the retail version of the game.