The Cake May Be a Lie, But This Video Exists
posted July 15th, 2009 11:27 PM EDT by Eli Hodapp in First Person Shooter, Games, Upcoming Games, iPhone games, iPod touch gamesThis evening we got tipped off on a strange video that appeared on YouTube showing a test build of a pretty convincing basic clone of Portal built in Unity running on an iPhone 3G:
It's unclear what the future of this project holds. Normally I would say producing something like this is the quickest way to get a cease and desist letter, but Valve has had rather unexpected reactions in the past to spin-off projects.
For instance, from the blog fan-made Portal prequel, Portal Prelude:
Yesterday, we got our first contact with the french community manager of Valve. Yes, Valve. The marvellous company that brought Portal and so much more to us for years. Don't take me wrong, I'm not trying to seduce anyone, but believe me, it was huge. I was so happy and so scared at the same time. For your information, they don't seem to bother about us doing a prequel for Portal. They're even sending us their congratulations and they seem to enjoy what we're doing.
Will this demonstration of a Portal-like game running on the iPhone receive the same blessing from Valve, or is the project legally doomed? We anxiously await Valve's response.
Love the title lol.
This game was awesome for the Xbox 360, hope Valve takes a look at this and decides to let the developer put this on the App Store! Probably under Valve's name ofcouse.
I would LOVE it if Valve came out with just about anything for the iPhone! Portal or not.
Controls horrible of course
As long as it's free, I doubt Valve will care.
Built with Unity? I'm impressed! I'd love to know how they created portals you can look through. At first I thought they hadn't implemented that, but then in the falling sequence it is obvious that they did.
This is infinitely awesome, official or not. I would much rather have this than a shitty Gameloft GTA clone.
Portal is THE game that I want on the iPhone. If this comes out, day one purchase.
FPS = amazing…
YES!!! Portal is still my favorite game on the 360.
Please let this be true, please let this be true, please let this be true, please let this be true…
this is the perfect sort of game for the touch. I would buy this in an instant.
Maybe valve will even work with you on it
I hope this happens, this is one of the better games on the 360!
Who knows the song? Is it Orbital or Orb or something?
It might be on the 360 now as a port, but please let's not forget that Valve's main audience and big breakthroughs have been PC games. I shudder at the thought that people are becoming more and more removed from PC gaming and are being forced into the molds that console gaming tries to put on us.
*steps off soapbox*
It's on ps3 too along with all the half lives
Yeah, the music's one of Orbital's "Sad But True" remixes from the "Times Fly" EP. I think this track is called "Sad But New."
100% fake
I'd love for Valve to release for iPhone (especially Portal) but they've shown a distinct lack of interest in developing for anything other than PC and Xbox 360.
They even offloaded the PS3 port of Orange Box to EA.
I'm not going to hold my breath until a Valve game appears on iPhone.
C'mon Valve, don't you like money being printed for you??
the cake is a lie, so is this. Well, if it isn't fake (fat chance), then I hope they make it with GlaDos voice and everything included in PC version. The game would miss so much without it.
i was hoping it would come to the iphone some day. My dream would have come true!
The capability to do this using Unity doesn't surprise me, so I'm guessing (hoping) it's real. I've been using the Unity demo for the past 4 days (not for iPhone development though), and in that time I've put together a FPS-like environment where you can move around and interact with boxes and such when you click on them. So it would seem like someone with enough time to figure out all the textures and experience to know what to do with it could make this happen. Totally sweet.
It's totally possible to do in Unity. I've implemented it myself for a project I was contracted on to make a web game (not finished yet and NDAed). All you need is some render textures or a stencil buffer and a good understanding of how projection matrices work.
yes…
c mon guys.. As fake as it could be!! Look at the way he
touches the iphone and how it responds!!
If it is real, Valve will probably wait until they finish developing it and sue to take it away. Free development.
Or Valve is really cool and the devs release it for free.
I assume it's real. Why not?
I played a Unity demo of this same portal functionality (from the same author, I assume) around 2 years ago, posted to the Unity forums. It wasn't on iPhone and the it was just an experiment with simpler crates, but it worked fine. And Unity has come a LONG way since then.
I didn't make this
You didn't? Well, yours was cool too
made with Unity!!! awesome!
Portal Prelude was a mod of Portal. You had to have Portal to run it and Valve has always been cool with the mod community for its games (except when the mod does something like make Alyx run around naked or something)
This Portal game for the iPhone is not a mod, it's a new game made using the Unity engine and Valve will not be cool with it. Maybe these guys will strike some deal with Valve to have Valve publish it but just because Valve hasn't squashed Portal Prelude doesn't mean they'll be fine with this.
Real doesn't mean it will be released, I agree. It could just be someone playing in Unity. (Which is fun–I know I do it. My iPhone will have stuff on it I have no intention of selling.)
I highly doubt this will ever make it to market. 1) I don't think Apple would approve it for the app store given the tenuous licensing complications it could cause. 2) It's much more likely that whoever made this video did so by simply making a video of gameplay, disabling touchscreen on the iPhone, playing the video and tapping like they were playing. 3) Even if this is real and does come out… I'd say there's maybe a 10% chance the controls wouldn't bite the big one. I know theres a few places in Portal that even using a keyboard and mouse were hard to get past… I don't even want to think how hard they'd be using crappy touchscreen controls
They wont risk a legal battle even though Valve have been and seem pretty relaxed about anyone doing stuff with their baby. Portal is probably the best puzzle/action game I have ever played and ever will play.