False leads

From Portal Puzzle Wiki

A major component of this article or section is speculation. The ideas and connections made here have not been confirmed by any official source.

Contents 1 IP Addresses 2 Websites 3 Ideas 4 Images 5 Emails from Valve developers

IP Addresses

• Wiki software automatically converts four consecutive tildes (~~~~) in to a user's signature. If the user is not logged in they are converted into that user's IP address. At certain points in some of the ASCII art there are places where four tildes occur. Please note that this is not a "lead", simply the IP of the user who contributed to the article.
• There is a strong possibility you will DDoS any IP address you "discover" if it is not a legitimate lead. Please be careful.
• use the <nowiki>ASCII ART HERE</nowiki> for art

Websites

• Aperture Science official website - Only contains information about the 2007 Portal game. It was updated Wednesday, February 13, 2008 7:12:13 PM. (Found in page info of http://aperturescience.com/ApertureScience17.swf).
  • cjohnson/tier3 - A login to the above website found in-game. It has nothing to do with the current ARG, as again, the website has not been updated.
• Babel Research - Fan site; Not related.
• Aperture Science Photograpy - No affiliation with Valve.
• Glados 311 - Fan site; Not related.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyUbiCsYIdw When sped up, Combine Overwatch dialogue ripped from Episode 2 is heard.
• Aperture Science Facebook - Fanmade
• Minerva - A mod created by Adam Foster, who is now a Valve employee. His mod has had several mini-ARGs in its promotion, but these are unrelated to the Portal Puzzle.
• http://steampowered.ca - Joke site.

Ideas

• Radio Frequency - Has been 85.2 for the entire history of the game, likely chosen for being out of standard US radio stations range.
• Achievement Jpg File Names - Filename is a hash of the file itself. Most likely this is a new method of naming the achievement image files to avoid filename collisions.
• Xen Skyboxes in the GCF - These have been in Portal since launch.

Images

• Portal gun - Fake/Fanmade; Source: [1]
• Portal robot - Fanmade [2]

Emails from Valve developers

On the 8th of March 2010, a user from the IRC received an e-mail from Dave Kircher. It reads:

S&$%HS( &# HS &#((@)  UDFYHS *#% HDFJ S()(%J DSF (H# %(%^(# @#@GBH#@( <DM ( %U&%^ ) $)* # @*@@I *#$K#H D(RJK$ D() 
*$#I *DK FS)S*U @JGMKD F)CMSO(* %.
Hope that clears things up.

People tried to decipher this code but soon realized it had no structure. Pastebin. Had it been genuine, it could have been an ASCII cipher. The original recipient of the email fired a message back to Dave, who responded "I don't know, I just held shift and pressed a bunch of buttons." This is fake.