Tag: The Secret Origins of Portal 2
Many gamers may be familiar with the indie project that started the ideas for Portal, a small development team of 8 students at DigiPen made a game called Narbacular Drop that threw the player into the role of a witch that could summon a blue and an orange portal that were linked, allowing her to walk into one and come out the other. The game’s basic concepts intrigued those at Valve, who hired the team to flesh out their idea into what would become Portal.
Portal 2 has a similar origin story that once again starts with a small group of students at DigiPen. This game, Tag: The Power of Paint, like Narbacular Drop offers a single gameplay mechanic that leads to endless possibilities. In Tag, you’re given a SuperSoaker-looking gun that can be loaded with different colors of paint. If you paint something green, you can jump high off its surface, if you paint something red, you will run really fast over the red paint, and if you paint something blue, you can walk along the blue surface, regardless if it’s on the side of a building or on the ceiling. This of course would later be further developed by Steam in the Portal 2 game; while you can’t shoot the paint directly, you’ll find gels that you can redirect onto surfaces to help you along. The green paint to jump is now blue gel, and the red paint to run fast is now orange gel. The blue paint to walk along surfaces has been mentioned in numerous interviews as having been in the game at some point, but every play tester apparently became motion sick and they couldn’t figure out a way to prevent it, so it was pulled. Instead we have the white gel, which turns any surface into a portal-able surface.
While Portal is a solid, polished experience, Narbacular Drop was more of a diamond in the rough. Tag: The Power of Paint certainly feels more polished, with a smooth frame rate and an interesting visual design (the world is completely black and white except for the three paint colors). It is, however, very short, with only 8 levels and no save feature it’s meant to be beaten in a single playthrough. For anyone that’s a fan of Portal 2 and wants to see where these ideas originated, I highly recommend checking out Tag: The Power of Paint, it’s fun, it’s fast and it’s free!
