Not long ago, on April 1st, 13 indie games pulled what appeared to be a prank on Valve by inserting potatoes into our games.  This was known as Potato Fools Day.  This blog post details how Gaijin Games contributed to the ARG geared towards getting Portal 2 released earlier than scheduled.

Way back in December, a bunch of us goofy indie devs were summoned to Valve’s offices under mysterious circumstances.

After one of those movie moments where they get you all in a room and say “you’re probably wondering why I’ve called you here today“, Gabe and his fancy minions told us that they wanted us to help them launch Portal 2.

The only catches were that we had to help them design a super-complex ARG, had unlimited access to their IP, got to work with a bunch of other exciting people, and got to eat a lot of food on their dime.

So, after the initial meeting, we started working on ideas for our part in the overall ARG.  One of the things that tickled us the most was including photo-realistic potatoes in BIT.TRIP BEAT, since none of the game is photo-realistic in the slightest.  In the first update, we added potatoes to the main menu and played make-believe like we were hacked.

Also in the first update, we included an unused MP3 in our update package that we hoped people would find.  It was called AdFurious.mp3.  AdFurious, as everyone knows, is an anagram for Audiosurf, one of the other games in on the Potato Fools Day shenanigans.  If you played Audiosurf using this MP3, you would be awarded with a potato at the end of the track.

Sadly, no one found AdFurious.mp3 until much later, but it was eventually found.

We also included new Facebook and Twitter messages “A sage sausage? I ate it fast! So sue us… we cave.” as well as a new icon.  When players adjusted the color values of this work of art, they would discover that it was part of the Aperture Science logo, which would lead them to start thinking of the overlays that people would be getting in update #2…

Our second update was relatively small.  We ended up creating a new achievement for players who made it to Stage 7 in Level 2 of BIT.TRIP BEAT while in Mega Mode.  This achievement was called “Long Fall” which was the password needed to access the hidden data packet in AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity.

We had our own overlay in Update 2, which requested the password “chips challenge” which could be discovered by playing The Wonderful End of the World.  Once the player input the correct password, a super-secret data packet would be downloaded to their computer.  Within these data packets were more puzzles and more clues, much too abundant and nefarious to describe here.  To access our Aperture Science Password screen, players had to be in Mega Mode when the boss of Level 2 only had 10 bricks left to destroy.

Update 3 was where we poured the majority of our blood, sweat, and tears. We created the Portal 2 themed “<test>” level (which, due to popular demand, we are keeping in the game even after all of this nonsense blows over).

We scored some tunes from the Portal 2 composer and crafted the level around the more action-packed song we got.  Not only were we given music, but we also got access to GLaDOS’s model, and tons of textures and other assets directly from the game!

During all of this, we were keeping our update notes sort of on the strange side of things, with the likes of an ascii version of the image below.

In the end, after all the clues from all 13 of our games were put together, the Portal 2 ARG community banded together to play all of our games so that GLaDOS could use all that gamer power to accelerate the launch of Portal 2, which I believe happened between 10 and 12 hours earlier than scheduled.

We were all at Valve for the launch party, and had a great time watching the live-updating GLaDOS@Home progress being made by the fan community.  Once all the bars were filled, the signal was given, and with a brief ceremony attended by the Portal 2 dev team, Valve, and even GLaDOS herself (via intercom), the champions from the ARG player community that Valve invited to the office pushed the button and shipped Portal 2.

Many thanks go out to everyone who helped us work on this amazing little side project.  Getting to meet all the other indie devs was a treat in and of itself, but the biggest treat of it all was watching how much fun gamers around the world had as they tried to solve this whole mystery.  To delve into their antics, I strongly encourage a visit to the dedicated Valve PotatoFoolsDay ARG Wiki.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and play some Portal 2.

Continue rocking on.  Over and out.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 22nd, 2011 at 4:27 pm and is filed under BIT.TRIP, Cohorts, Dominance, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.