Portal | 2007 | PC | Valve
Oh come on, we had to didn’t we? Portal’s end credits are the juicy, planet-sized cherry on top of a cake made out of awesome and cherub laughter. There may, in fact, be no more heart-warming round-off to a game than GLaDOS’ jaunty little ballad “Still Alive”. After lying, bribing and threatening her way to the end of Portal with some of the best-written and delivered dialogue in a game to date, upon her destruction the increasingly unhinged super-computer takes a more philosophical note.
She sings of how she doesn’t mind that we’ve beaten her and escaped. She wishes us well. She talks of all the things she wants to do in the future and how much science is left still to work on. And it’s all blended beautifully with the insincere sincerity and embarrassed face-saving excuses she’s used throughout the whole game, and performed so well that by the end it’s almost hard to tell whether she means it or not. Over the course of Portal we were intimidated by her, frustrated by her, rebelled against her, and eventually killed her. But after this song it’s impossible not to find her rather sweet, albeit in a deeply psychotic kind of way.
