Portal (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Portal (2021)

macintoshgarden.org

124 pointsKye32 comments

Here's the post where I found this with bonus video of it in action: https://dialup.cafe/@vga256/111926765062980053

I loved this game/novel. It really was more of a novel than a game but it worked really well. I played alone in my quiet apartment so I really did feel like the main character.

In the game (yes this is explained on the site), you're an astronaut who arrives back on earth 100yrs after you left. You find no one is on earth. You find a single active computer terminal which you use to research what happened. You eventually discover an AI which helps you and "generates" most of the narrative. Since in real life, you are at a computer using this terminal, you're the main character in that sense that you're the astronaut.

It's also interesting because because it came out in 1986 so it's idea of what a future computer terminal would look like, what services it would offer, etc are all shaped by what was common in 1986. There were no web browsers in 1986. There was Compuserve, GEnie, BBSes, stuff like that.

Also, I'm not sure the Mac version is best. I'm pretty sure I played on an Amiga which is at least color (Mac didn't have color til 1987)

https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=856

Not that color is important for the game, but it is at least a more "modern" terminal than monochrome and so fits the theme a tiny bit better.

Randomly, I remember a minor character in the story had otter fur on her head and down her back because genetic engineering had gotten to a level that made that easily possible.

The Digital Antiquarian has written a long article on the game and links to the C64 version if you want to play it for yourself: https://www.filfre.net/2014/11/portal/

The author of this later published it as a novel, because while the C64/Apple II/DOS/Amiga/Mac version was presented as a game, there really wasn't much influence from the user -- it was more akin to modern visual novels rather than adventure games.

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL10384355M/Portal

The Macintosh Garden is a jewel of the internet. I’m upset to hear so many people have it blocked for them.

This game is also hosted on archive.org [1]. If the Garden link is blocked then you may or may not have better luck downloading from there. I would be interested to know if archive.org is blocked for anyone.

[1] https://archive.org/details/portal-1986

I enjoyed Portal on the C64, so much so that I actually wrote Rob Swigart when I was toying with making a recreation of the virtual world it depicted. He thought it sounded like a fun project and even sent me a copy of the book. Probably should dust that idea off sometime.

This game seems to be a lot more like the game Duskers in concept without the command-line control of drones that make that game more like survival horror. Some unknown cataclysm has befallen all of humanity and as the sole survivor you have to piece together what happened by going from wreck to wreck collecting logs.

A big part of my childhood was playing black & white games on the Mac: the MacVenture games (Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate); the World Builder and action games from Silicon Beach (Enchanted Scepters, Dark Castle, etc.); and the early Sierra adventure games (Space Quest I-III, Kings Quest I-III).

Unfortunately, the newest (beta) version of the MiniMac emulator doesn't work for my silicon Macbook Air.

I thought I might be able to run this with Mini vMac, but I have no idea where to get a ROM image. Why can't it be legal to have ROM images for these obsolete systems downloadable? It's not like Apple could lose anything by it.

Google "Mac Plus ROM" and it's one of the top results...

The game itself is a booter according to the person who put this together, so you don't need the OS.

Yes, but you'll still need the Toolbox ROM.

Would love to play this on an emulator hosted on something like Archive.org.

It's an early example of hypertext, so naturally someone made a Hypertext Markup Language version.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070208002752/http://portal.sto...

Sadly, once you get far enough in (the end of Day 6 is entirely missing), a lot of the links are broken. Kind of fitting, but it does make it harder to read.

And please do play it. It's excellent. I have the PC port somewhere.

> Your provider (M247 Europe SRL) does not have access to this website. Contact the staff per electronic letter via support at macintosh.garden if you believe this to be a mistake or otherwise an error

What? I'm just on ProtonVPN.

Title should be Portal (1986)

The fact is was made available on a website in 2021 is neither here nor there. The game itself is from 1986, and needs to be distinguished from Portal, the incredibly well known 2007 video game.

From the title alone, a casual reader is more likely to think the 2007 game was remade in 2021

The convention is to put the date of publication of the submitted thing. In this case, the archive entry. I like the think people can work out pretty quick that an ancient hypertext game isn't a modern 3D puzzle game.

That's because what is submitted is usually an article. The thing being linked, the thing of value to the reader, is a news report or opinion piece created in that year.

In this case, it's irrelevant that a game-wiki added this 1986 game to their site in 2021. There are other websites that catalogued the same game in a different year. What matters to the reader - what they get when they click the link - is an adventure game called Portal from 1986. Hence why "Portal (1986)" would be a more honest title.

People can also work out quickly that they got conned by a clickbait title, but they only find out after clicking. They'd rather not be conned at all, the link title should be honest.

"conned"

There's no deception here. Just a disagreement over notation. I don't think someone comes in expecting a quirky puzzle game and is aggrieved to find a different quirky puzzle game.

If it bugs you that much, talk to whoever changed the title. I submitted it without a year because I didn't know it was from 2021.

I speak only for myself, but I clicked with expectations of something relating to the famous 2007 game.

I have been conned, and I am aggrieved. Hence why I'm wasting my time here trying to get it put right.

This is what clickbait is.

If I see a headline "Ronaldo signs for AC Milan", and I click it and it's Ronaldo Munck (a sociologist unrelated to the world-famous footballer), he signing for delivery of an air conditioning unit at his home in Milan, not entering into a contract with the world-famous Italian football team... I was duped. Conned. Swindled. The title made implications that weren't met, and my time was wasted.

Be honest with prospective readers. Call it Portal (1986). The 2021 has nothing to do with anything, and just lays the groundwork for hoodwinking.

Okay. Tell it to whoever changed the title, or email the mods to make your case (bottom of the page). That's a pretty high level access! So someone with more clout than either of us felt 2021 was right (and I tend to agree but don't care either way). That's on top of it being added to and voted out of the second chance queue on to the front page without a year.

You're making your case in the wrong place to the wrong person and going against what seems to be a strong multi-tier consensus that it's fine.

There's no consensus, I also think this is ridiculous. At the very least, remove the (2021) like all the other software links on HN.

Again, it's not me. I didn't put a year in and I can't edit it.

> I speak only for myself, but I clicked with expectations of something relating to the famous 2007 game.

Mismatched expectations, by themselves, do not make a "con" or "hoodwink." Those require intent. Calling the headline "confusing" or "misleading" is fine, but, given that the norms here is to put the year of publication of the linked page, assuming intent to mislead is a bridge to far.

This site can't be reached.

> Your provider (Microsoft Corporation) does not have access to this website. Contact the staff per electronic letter via support at macintosh.garden if you believe this to be a mistake or otherwise an error

What a dick move.

No, I don't work for MS corporation. I'm fucking using a cheap Azure VM instance running OpenSSH as a socks proxy. Otherwise, I would have to access it through my https-man-in-the-middle corporate firewall.

I'm surprised you encounter few enough blocks for this to stand out. Scrapers and nuisance bots are rampant on cloud hosts, so lots of sites block their IPs.

Honestly, not that many. I have been blocked so far only on some video streaming platforms. Most of "normal" sites seem not to care.

> No, I don't work for MS corporation. I'm fucking using a cheap Azure VM instance running OpenSSH as a socks proxy. Otherwise, I would have to access it through my https-man-in-the-middle corporate firewall.

Download it on your personal machine then

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