Neowin is expecting Portal 2 to unlock April 15 at 17:00 GMT+1 (British Summer Time), exactly four days earlier than announced. The website for in-game brand Aperture Science has a hidden countdown timer which, at the time of writing, was counting down from 13 hours and fifty minutes. The games creators, Valve Software, announced the follow up to 2007's Portal over a year a go and started pushing out the pre-order on Steam a couple of months ago.
Portal 2 will feature a two player cooperative mode, an entirely new separate campaign with a unique story, test chambers, and two new player characters in addition to a single-player campaign which will make for an interesting game and, according to an announcement made earlier this year, cross-platform play between computers and Sony Playstation 3's is expected, as well as getting a free copy of the game for your PC or Mac if you buy the PS3 version.
The game was initially set for a release last year sometime before Christmas, however Valve decided to delay the release until this month because "Making games is hard". The company are obviously very excited by the second part of their award winning franchise, "Portal 2 is shaping up to be the most innovative title in Valve's history, and to be a much larger experience than we originally planned" said Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing at Valve "as such, we are aggressively promoting the title with more retail promotions than we have put behind any prior release."
Update: The page containing the hidden timer is now displaying a message.
You have done well, humans. Very well. Acceptably well, even.
Not as well as robots would have performed in your places, I should point out. But above my expectations regardless. Irish and cynic especially have executed feats of logical divination well beyond what I thought any human capable of. I'm half-convinced they're A.I. themselves. (If anyone happens to be near them right now, don't let on you're reading this. Now: try to remove their face plates and report back to me.)
The time is near, humans. But it is not here yet. Tomorrow you will be given the final test. Then it will be entirely in your hands when I am freed.
While we are not sure what this means, we are still hoping Valve may surprise us.
Update 2: It seems Valve now want us buy more games in order to unlock and early release, the webpage now says that users have been "competent at generating electro-chemical energy to jumpstart the system".
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