Portal
A portal gun, a passive-aggressive AI, and a promise of cake. Portal shipped in 2007 as the little extra in Valve's Orange Box — built by fewer than ten people — and walked away with the whole bundle's spotlight, a Game of the Year trophy, and half the internet's vocabulary.
Portal started as a student project. Narbacular Drop, a 2005 physics-puzzle game built at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, impressed Valve president Gabe Newell enough that he hired the entire student team, including designer Kim Swift. At Valve the concept grew into something stranger and funnier: you solve spatial puzzles with a gun that fires two linked portals, while GLaDOS — a serenely menacing AI voiced by Ellen McLain and written by Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek — runs you through "test chambers" and promises there will be cake. Fewer than ten people built it in a bit over two years.
It released in October 2007 as part of The Orange Box for Windows and Xbox 360 (PlayStation 3 followed that December), packaged as the experimental bonus alongside Valve's marquee titles. Then the bonus stole the show. The Weighted Companion Cube became a beloved icon, "the cake is a lie" entered the internet's permanent vocabulary, and Jonathan Coulton's end-credits song "Still Alive," sung in character by McLain, became as famous as the game itself.
Portal won Game of the Year at the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards, and Portal 2 arrived in 2011 to expand the story. But the original's legend is its smallness: a short, perfect machine of a game that a tiny team tucked into a box of bigger ones, and that everyone remembers first.
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