TechRadar spoke with Valve’s game designer and Half-Life: Alyx Development Lead Robin Walker. During the interview, the journalists managed to find out an interesting detail about Portal. It turns out that in the early stages of development, GLaDOS was not in the game. This artificial intelligence, which accompanies users through the passage and is remembered for its caustic comments, was added to prevent the project from being perceived as a training set.

Robin Walker said: “GLaDOS didn’t exist then – it was just a ‘game’. I remember that testers came to us and had a lot of fun. And I remember that a lot of them finished [the walkthrough] and, in fact, wrote in their reviews: “All this workout was really fun, but when will the game start?” And then we thought, “Boy, this is the game.” [We wondered] what makes people go through these levels, end up and ask where does the game start? What signals are needed to make them believe that this is a game? “

“GLaDOS was born out of a set of theories that we had, – continued Robin Walker. – [The players] have to believe that all this training has a purpose, there has to be some kind of antagonist, there has to be some threat, some kind of force, something that creates a sense of resistance. Perhaps you had to have an idea of ​​what failure becomes for users. “.