Since Portal is essentially a first person puzzle game, the team initially thought it would simply end on what they thought was appropriate, a puzzle more complex than anything the player had seen before. That solution, they said, was a pain.

Their first proper boss fight attempt, when GLaDOS was just a translucent shimmery cube, was the "Giant Laser" battle. Players had to direct lasers back at GLaDOS to destroy it. It wasn't fun and the lasers were just too difficult to aim.

Boss battle attempt number two, their "Mortal Kombat" stab, was full of intensity. Missing flying, turrets spawning, an out of place firefight than belied Portal's slower paced, cerebral gameplay. It also sucked, according to Wolpaw.

Attempt number three was a chase sequence. But the pacing was horrible and there was no opportunity to communicate to the player.

Around this time, Wolpaw said the Half-Life 2 Episode Two guys excitedly said to the Portal team "Our final battle is gonna have 100 Striders, you're going to get to drive a car and fight dozens of mini-Striders. It's gonna be awesome! What are you guys gonna do?"

With a tiny team on Portal, they simply couldn't match a boss battle that epic, and they ultimately created the time limited incinerator set piece as the final fight.

The Portal team's limited resources also forced them to "trim the narrative fat" elsewhere. Swift talked about a proposed scene involving "The Rat Man" the fellow escaped test subject whose writing and sketches appear in the game's later levels.

As far as Portal's other co-star, the Weighted Companion Cube, its origins lie in addressing player frustration with finishing the "box marathon" level that features the lovable crate. Wolpaw said that he was inspired to give the Cube a little personality by what he'd been reading in de-classified government interrogation manuals. "They're great," he said, pointing to findings that people in isolation become emotionally attached to inanimate objects.

Wolpaw had advice for those trying to write a "funny" game—"God help you." He related his previous experience with Psychonauts, on which he was one of the game's writers. Upon name dropping the cult favorite, Wolpaw was met with a huge round of applause. "More people just clapped than bought the game," he joked.

"Hearing macho tough guy dialogue is annoying enough, but hearing the same joke fifty times, a couple of which may actually be funny can be much worse," Wolpaw said. He called the playtesting of Psychonauts "psychological torture", his comedic script met with silence when being pumped out of 40 monitors in the QA section at Double Fine Productions.

When the two had wrapped up their session, taking questions from the audience, the discussion quickly moved to plans for Portal 2. Swift and Wolpaw mostly dodged the question, with the latter saying "I'm just trying to bask in the moment... without people bugging me about it."

Some unknown fraction of the staff of Rock, Paper, Shotgun got a chance to interview Wolpaw, shedding a faint ray of light on the creative background of Portal, Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2.

While you might expect that becoming a successful video game writer would immediately go to one's head, transforming him from one-time game reviewing bottom feeder into a coke-snorting, model-screwing superstar, Wolpaw's got a modest grasp on his craft.

Don't get me wrong, I love a well-written game. But I'm not gonna kid myself: Good game + crappy writing is probably still gonna more or less equal good game. It's like how the Precious Moments Special Edition Bible is extra good because it has Precious Moments illustrations, but even if you completely subtract the Precious Moments stuff, it's not a whole lot less good, because it's still the Bible.

He's still got it. Expect plenty more interview hilarity, just don't expect much in the way of clear answers.

RPS Interview: Valve's Erik Wolpaw [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Prowling about on GooTube this morning for Portal stuff, I found this great gameplay video that — unlike the others I've seen — doesn't seem to take place at the Superdome in full riot. You can clearly hear the sound and the robotic announcer's voice, parroting the words of the mighty Erik Wolpaw:

"Now that you are in control of both portals, this next test could take a very, very long time. If you become lightheaded from thirst, feel free to pass out and an associate will be dispatched to revive you with adrenaline."

Can't hardly wait. Florian Eckhardt

Valve, you don't need to go viral to interest me in Portal. You had me at reaching down, fiddling with my junk, then saying "Hello." But now, you've given us Aperture Science.

Login with any name, then use the password PORTAL. You can also type HELP at the beginning.

And from there, you can really see what Erik from Old Man Murray has been doing with his time since he was hired at Valve. Florian Eckhardt