Half-Life Fallout: Monkeh - Viewing Profile

RPS: During a panel, you talked about a bunch of stuff that got removed from the final product of Portal. The whole Turret Wife thing, where Chell would marry a turret and then it’d stalk her – Slender-style – for the rest of the game. Stuff like that. Which was hilarious. Can you talk about any other stuff you’ve taken out of games? Or projects that Valve hasn’t gone through with? Erik Wolpaw: I talked about something today, where you were going to actually meet Cave Johnson at one point in the underground. He was just going to be a… They had actually uploaded his AI into this crummy cardboard box, basically. You find it and there’s a ledge that you have to get onto to get out of this room. It’s too high for you to jump on, and because it’s a game, you can’t mantle on to it. So you have to unplug Cave, effectively killing him, so you can use him as a stepstool to get up onto this ledge. We just never quite worked out the gameplay for it, so we cut that.

The Turret Wife thing, everybody liked it, but there’s just cuts that need to be made in order to ship a game. At some point we sat down and we thought about it. We said, “This is funny, but it doesn’t move the story. There’s no gameplay thing that we’re cutting. If you cut this, the story still makes sense. It hangs together. Let’s make the decision not to put it in.” It would have been a huge amount of effort to do that Turret Wife thing, problems to solve. At some point we were just like, “Good idea, but it’s not worth spending another year working on the game to put this in.” Especially because there’s no story beat that it really fulfilled. It was just this funny extra bit.