Portal

Japanese prop company Neca is working on a replica of the Portal Gun.

Hats off to the incredible skills of this engineer who managed to create the heelsprings that prevent Chell from falling to her death in Portal. Wearing these carefully crafted pieces of genius to any cos-play event would ensure hero status and glances of pure jealously in equal measure. But that's not all, the creator, Harrison Krix, also has an impressive array of other real life gaming gadgets. Click inside to see more.

Portal: No Escape, the short film by Dan Trachtenberg, landed at the top of this year's Viewfinder List, a compilation of shorts voted on by film industry insiders that gives exposure to independent artists that could lead to success down the road.

As part of the recent commission of Valve licences to toy manufacturers, an all-new real-world representation of the popular Companion Cube featured in the widely respected Portal games will be making its way to retail stores this winter. Designed to keep you warm on those long cold nights, the Companion Cube Plushie is the ideal friend for any gamer.

Portal was fantastic, and much of that credit lies with Valve’s creation of the universe and characters of the world. That said, as important as GLaDOS, Chell, and the Companion Cube were, the portals themselves—and the mechanics and physics of them—are what really made the game. The concept of puzzling with portals comes from Kim Swift’s Nebtacular Drop, a student project that preceded Portal by several years. After working with Valve as the lead designer on Portal she left to join Airtight Games, and has now revealed her next project: Quantum Conundrum. It’s a first-person puzzler that sounds… well, it sounds a little like Portal...

We've seen a slew of unofficial Portal films cross our monitors in recent years, but this most recent short from The Totally Rad Show host and filmmaker Daniel Trachtenberg definitely takes the, uh, sugary baked dessert...

The voice of GladOS is recording for more Portal content and a new game.

@XG247 Ellen McLain, the voice acrtress behind many of Valves characters, is lending her talents to a new game from Valve. Ellens husband (and fellow Valve voice actor) John Lowrie revealed on Twitter that Ellen is going in Tuesday for a new game and more Portal work.

Media Molecule co-founders came close to depriving the world of Portal, Alex Evans revealed during a Develop conference taking place in Brighton this morning. In 2005, Evans was working at Bullfrog with fellow Media Molecule co-founders, Mark Healey and Kareem Ettouney. At the time we trying to do R&D, trying to work out what the next thing was, doing a lot of concept work, said Evans. We worked on a project that actually was shown at GDC that year. It's lost, but if you dig through the GDC vaults there's this little game that never saw the light of day but that had a bunch of ideas in it. The game in question was known as The Room, and as Media Molecule creative director Mark Healey explained, it had certain similarities to Valve's hit puzzler. It was these clay cubes that you make things out of, and then put them through portals and do very trippy things, said Healey.

On sale November 16th, Valve Presents: The Sacrifice and other Steam-Powered Stories. This will include comics from the worlds of Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, and Portal.