Valve, Portal and ASCII

Earlier in the week the good people at Valve ran a mysterious update on Portal. Typically an update will run with a message similar to "fixed clipping issue in xx level" or some other things. This week update ran with "Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum manage." This caused a bit of a stir right away, and resulted in maybe one of the most interesting viral campaigns I've witnessed.

Following that forum you'll see that quickly people figured out there were new audio files added to the game. And as they explored those audio files they figured out they contained data that was a set of images. And once they decoded all the images they found a phone number that needed to be called with an old school modem. Once connected this video ran.

Needless to say the community is still perplexed as too what this all means. But as I set here, drinking coffee from my Aperture Science mug, I can only hope that we get the conclusion to the Half Life Episodes and hopefully a sequel to Portal. And just for good measure, here is the end song from Portal.