Shoutbox

Portal: Prelude is an unofficial prequel to Valve's Portal. In contrary to the many map packs and community maps we've seen since the release of this game, this is actually a full-blown modification of the game. Portal: Prelude contains a whole new story with nineteen new levels, new sounds and new portal techniques which makes this mod truly stand out. To be honest, this is a whole new game, and it's completely free.

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Portal: Prelude, as its name states it, is an unofficial prequel to the game Portal. Its story revolves around the pre-GlaDOS epoch, even before she was plugged in. At this time, test subjects were monitored by real Aperture Science employees whose work was tedious, lengthy and repetitive. This is why they decided to build a great artificial intelligence that could both replace them in these difficult tasks, but also take responsibility for many other tasks within the complex and compete with Black Mesa's superiority. All employees of the Aperture Science complex are now eagerly awaiting GlaDOS. Maybe even a little too eagerly, as the upcoming events will tell...
Source: Portal: Prelude - About

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The mod was announced as a complete surprise, one day the website just popped up and the single blog post in it pointed to the official trailer on Vimeo (HD download is here). The news spread quickly and the more people got to know, the more they got excited. Everything about this is quality, all levels have been constructed with all gaming aspects (complexity, hints, originality) in mind and tested thoroughly.

As much as the announcement was a surprise, so was its release. Originally planned and announced to be released at the first birthday of the Orange Box, they came with another surprise yesterday and told the world that it will already be available one day before the official release on FilePlanet. Unfortunately, this means long waiting times and not too great download speeds when you're a free user (like almost everyone, no?) but it's definitely worth the time when you have followed their website for the last two weeks. On the other side, it'll be available on a dozen of other official mirrors at October 9th at midnight GMT+01 (that's the same as UTC or the time in England with DST taken in account).

I already downloaded it! Can't wait to get it running, have some homework to do first. Actually, I was surprised that no-one made a topic about this before... Where are the gamers here?

Official website and weblog: http://www.portalprelude.com/
Reviews:

• Planet Half-Life
  
• ModDB
  
• Game On You UK