Sorry for the inconvenience but support for Portal: Prelude is no longer provided.
We are aware that there are has been some problems running this game, for example with the free version of Portal on Windows. There isn't much we can do about that. Valve's official position is that: No Source mods are included with the free Promotional Offer [...] These mods are only included with Valve games purchased through Steam or from a retail store. You must purchase a Source game included in this list. If you're looking for help, head over the Steam community forums which are still working!

This mod was released in 2008 and we all moved on in favor of other projects (or stopped working around modding altogether). This website itself is no longer maintained since Google dropped most of the features of Blogger in May 2010 and we can't update it anymore without a major overhaul (which is not going to happen).

Happy Birthday Portal: Prelude!

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

Today, it's been exactly one year since we first released Portal: Prelude. It was a hell of a year, but even if there's still some people discovering or playing the mod for the first time right now as I write, things highly cooled down.

We tried to calculate the total download count, but this is just too hard to do after one year. Some websites have gone down, some websites don't count downloads, some others resetted their counters and some didn't even changed for a few months. There was an approximate additionnal 200,000 downloads during the last 25 weeks, which means people still download the mod on an average basis of 1150 times a day. That's still a good score.

According to statistics and extrapolations, the mod was approximately downloaded 1,000,000 times since the release. But that still doesn't count magazines, sharing websites and peer to peer softwares, which probably represent at least 50% more players. I guess you, people, liked what we did. So, thanks, and if you don't get what I'm talking about, refer yourself to the 'Reminder' article.

Reminder

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

For the few of you that are still arriving on this website for the first time, welcome! Take your time to understand what's going on via the links on the right and feel free to download the mod if you wish.

Dont forget that there's a FAQ answering most if not all of the most common questions I received by e-mail during the last months. Remember, to play the game, you need Portal, this is not a standalone game, and the mod won't appear in your Steam games list if:

• You don't own Portal at all.
• You never launched Portal from Steam.
• You're using a pirated version of Portal.
• You didn't install the mod properly (unlikely since it's automated)

Anyway, thanks for passing by and feel free to talk about the mod in the forums if you wish. But please, be polite, be efficient. It's been almost 9 months since the mod was first released and I'm now working on something else. Sorry if it takes me a while to do some support or reply to your messages.

Cheaters aboard!

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

A week ago, I praised our new player, Stimich, who managed to break almost all the time trial records on Portal: Prelude. Today, it has come to my hears that there could be a problem. Some fellow speedrunners warned me about some suspicious details on Stimich's videos and I decided to give it a little investigation.

After a few hours of research on the Internet with my friend Google and with the help of one of the former Prelude record holder, I indeed found quite a few suspicious details. First, this guy is commenting out on a video named "How To Cheat In Portal Without Cheating" where he actually states that he's trying to cheat. Then you can find all of his Portal time trials on some weird website named "Cheat Grabber". And finally, when you take the time to download and decode his time trial videos, there's a problem.

Here's a random part of his video where he's just moving his aim from the ceiling to the ground in order to shoot a portal.

As you can see, in a normal situation, it takes something like 8 to 10 frames to move like this. But at the beginning of his video of the 12th room, there's a little problem.

On this section, he's moving the same way almost 4 times during half the time needed. He's even changing his aim from front to behind in one frame. I slowed it down to 1 fps and one of the shots he turned and shot in 1 fps and then the next frame he was aiming directly back where he was before. This is just impossible to achieve, even with superhuman powers.

This cheat can be categorized as a Tool Assisted Speedrun and it's such a shame that people are trying to cheat us for no reason on a free mod. That's not like if there was some prize for the winner. On this Youtube page, you can find a demonstration of a Tool Assisted Speedrun, and as you can see it's perfectly invisible for the game, but not for the eye. As a conclusion, all of Stimich's scores are going to be deleted from the ladder and replaced with the previous ones. Stimich is also banned from any future ladder entry, unless he proves his innocence.

A challenger appears!

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

For those of you who aren't really fond of scores and speed runs and don't regularly follow our challenges ladder either, be advised that there was some huge changes recently. During the last months, the scores were somewhat freezed and nothing changed significantly. But a newcomer appeared two week ago and now, he's slowly crushing every score, beating 10 time trials out of 14.

As you can see, Stimich seems to know how to think with portals more than anyone else. This run is particularly impressive. If you think you can stand up to him, feel free to try, but I think we reached some physical limits around these scores. I don't think someone will be able to do much better, apart if we're talking about some bots playing Portal: Prelude, of course.

Portal: Prelude approaches the million downloads

Posted by Nicolas (permalink)

Almost six months passed since the first release of Portal: Prelude, and even if the team is now working hard on something else, we keep watching our big baby grow more and more every day. Six monthes after the release, the time has come for a little overview of the situation.

My Portal: Prelude folder in Thunderbird contains 2246 emails. I can't count the ones I didn't replied to, but it shouldn't be more than 3 or 4 hundred max. In fact, it means that we reveived approximately 13 messages a day since the release... but it's flawed by the fact we probably received 50% of them during the first month. Anyway, it's a lot of text.

The most important part of this article is that we made another approximation of the total download count since the release, because we're curious. We merged the download counts of each version (1.0.0, 1.1.0 and 1.1.5 only, not including patches) of each of our mirrors and browsed the whole Internet searching for alternate mirrors... and the result is quite impressive.

Evolution of downloads since the release

We listed 748,493 confirmed downloads, which means there was something like 450,000 new downloads between Christmas 2008 and today. At this rate, we'll reach the million downloads in more or less 2 months. That's crazy because it also means the mod is still downloaded more or less 4,000 times a day six months after the release. Two times more than during the first month.

'New' vs 'olds' downloads since the release

Well, no need to tell you it's far from what we've been expecting when we made this little project. The funniest part beeing that we probably already exceeded the million, because we can't count how many times the mod was distributed in DVD and CD-ROM along with famous magazines such as Igromania in Russia, PC Action in Germany, PC Games in UK or PC Powerplay in Australia.

For the few (or maybe not) of you that are still arriving on this website for the first time, welcome! Take your time to understand what's going on via the links on the right and feel free to download the mod if you wish, I added a bit more mirrors to the list since the flow of downloads doesn't seem to decrease.