Teasing the press as much as telling, Valve says Portal 2 won’t be ready until 2011, and that we can all thank our deities-of-choice, in so many words, for the delay.
“Making games is hard,” said Valve in a press release that describes its upcoming geometry-bending first-person puzzler as a “public safety concern” that had to be pushed back to, you know, ensure the safety of civilization as we know it.
“Even though Portal 2 will arrive slightly later than planned,” reads the dispatch, “all life on earth won’t instantaneously stop as every molecule in your body explodes at the speed of light, which is what would happen should a rip ever appear in the fabric of Valve Time.”
Let’s see. I guess that means we’ve had a few close calls in recent years. Like the hypothetical laceration that almost occurred when tens of thousands of Left 4 Dead fans threatened to boycott Valve’s zombie-pulping sequel, then reneged and bought it en masse anyway. Or the near-rent in 2004, when Steam glitched just as Half-Life 2 was launching. And–I don’t know, maybe it’s just me–there’s this thing about the company (Valve) that owns Steam (the purportedly agnostic digital distribution game service) serving up both its own games as well as competitor products. Reality-collapsing conflict of interest? I guess only “time” will tell.
In the meantime, let’s just be grateful Valve’s seen fit to save us from global catastrophe–at least until those Large Hadron Collider guys drop a non-evaporating black hole through the planet’s core.
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