Topic: New Portal Achievement Hints At Portal 2

The Story:

Valve updated the original Portal to include a new achievement called "Transmission Received". Essentially Valve put Aperture Radios in each test chamber and when you bring the radio to a certain area, you will hear a message in Morse code. Actually, almost all of these messages are encrypted pictures that all have the Aperture Science logo stamp on it. There are a few messages that are actual messages that are Morse code which, of course in Valve viral marketing, translate into random nonsense (or so Valve wants us to believe).

Proof:

www.boingboing.net News Post: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/01/not-a-lie-valve-upda.html
Actual Morse Code Messages Translations: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1169084

You should check out the images they got from the other sounds.

Portal is absolutely brilliant, and one of the best games ever made. A sequel would be much welcome.

Spoiler Warning:
[youtube:moIlBqygQag]
best end credits ever, a nice gift for those who finish it. icing on the "cake".

Portal 2: I Lied About the Cake.

@Ravage I have looked at them, and they are pretty creepy/mysterious.

@Swiket Where in the world do people find pictures like that? I MUST KNOW!!!

@Firkraag Agreed.

new update to portal means more puzzles:
http://kotaku.com/5485075/valve-updates-portal-again-the-game...

recap of what's been found up until now in the update before this one
http://kotaku.com/5484157/valves-portal-puzzle-so-far-the-fil...

If they make a sequel, it should be a larger standalone game. It's the only Orange Box game i'm interested in.

That pic is so full of win Swiket!

You all have to see the new ending video for the Portal! It's jaw-dropping!

WARNING: Spoilers for anyone who has not finished the game. For those that have finished, your mind will be BLOWN.

Wait, so before I watch that video... if I update Portal through Steam, then beat it again, I'll be treated to the new ending? I ask because I wouldn't mind beating it again (after I finish Portal Prelude, which I'm just about to the end of finally), and I'll wait if I know that I can see the ending for myself.

I have Portal: Still Alive, did it get the update too?

Whoa, that`s awesome. Do you have to get the new achievement to get that ending? I don`t recall anything to do with beans in either HL2 or Portal...

Out of curiosity, who else here also played through the fan-made mod packs, the Flash Version Map Pack and Portal Prelude?

i'll have to beat this game again and see that updated ending when all of these updates are over since it seems every other day they update the game a bit now.

@Swiket That's still an interesting find since that seems to be a totally new texture just for that specific prop. I do imagine that there will be another update to the ending to replace the placeholder prop with and actual robot and a swerve of the camera to see what the robot is.

@warioswoods I've played them and found them quite enjoyable. I'd also recommend another mod called "Portal Aperture DeJaVu". It's a mod that lets you choose your own path out of many and it has some good replay value. You can find it on ModDB.

@V8 Ninja

I hadn't heard of that mod yet, so I'll have to check it out. I certainly enjoyed the other two (I still have to finish Portal Prelude, but I'm near the very end now).

Whoa! Check out this! http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1173283

I haven`t played Portal in a while, but I did hear some of the mods were really good. Also, apparently someone who did a Portal mod got hired by Valve at some point.

@Ravage Weird. It's supposedly from the Appolo Guidance Computer. Is Aperture trying to build a rocket? There's another picture that shows a launch pad, so that must be it. But why is Aperture trying to build a rocket? Darn those crafty Valve viral marketers...

Yep, now I just have to wait until tomorrow to find out about that bar.

This whole update thing is the most brilliant game marketing of all time. If you have any doubts as to the immense complexity of the path of breadcrumbs they left for their most obsessive techie fans, here's an account of how some of the latest images were obtained:

was helping to decode all of this on Monday. And it was really cool.

Popping open the updated .gcf (game archive) revealed 9 new files - the "dinosaur" wav files. The first few are clearly in Morse code. Translating the Morse revealed some rather cryptic messages that sounded like a GlaDOS bootup sequence. One Morse message encoded the word "BEEP" or "BEEEP" - translating those from Morse revealed "LOL". Another Morse message was clearly an MD5 sum - reversing that revealed the phrase "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", which sounded like another test.

Then the sounds got more confusing - they were much noisier. Someone in the forums, presumably a ham, ran those sounds through a SSTV decoder and came up with some clear, deliberate images. The images were full of random stuff, but one image had what looked like an amber terminal with the pattern (###) (###)-(####) - a phone number

Each image had 4 hexadecimal digits circled. Taking them in order from the pictures revealed another md5 hash. Somebody wrote a little python script - assuming that the area code would be near Seattle (Valve headquarters), they brute-forced the md5 and came up with a phone number.

Dialing the phone number played a dialtone. While most of the people on the forum couldn't wrap their head around connecting to a computer without the internet, some folks fired up HyperTerminal and connected, getting a login screen. After looking around again, they found a hint in one of the pictures to try backup/backup. Each time this password was used, a "record dump" (mostly ASCII art) was sent.

I wouldn't believe it if I wasn't part of it. Reversing an MD5 hash, come on. But it's true - you can run the script yourself.

And here are the ASCII images obtained over telnet from that phone number:
http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/6278/portalascii.png