Points: 5 Cover Story: It Came From Outer Space!  Orange Box
Afterthoughts and The Future of Valve  continued, (page 4 of 6)
GFW: The austere setting ... I'm not pulling this out of my ass,
you know.  KS: We were working with complex environments way
back when, but that was the wrong idea for Portal. Because we're
introducing a new concept, it was best to keep it bare bones. In
one section, all you were supposed to do was put a box on a
button and open a door. One player literally spent 30 minutes
trying to push a shelf onto the button, meanwhile, the box was
sitting right there. That's how the clinical test-chamber
environment came to be.  JB: One reference we used was The
Island, which was this movie about clones in a sterile
environment. One breaks free, like in Logan's Run.  GFW: Did you
set out to develop a short game?  KS: Well, we knew what we
wanted to cover. If we added much more, the pacing wouldn't work
as well. We wanted people to have a good time from beginning to
end.  GFW: You're going up agai