I played Portal before I played any other Valve game. I'd never experienced the Half Life series, completely skimmed over the Team Fortress 2 fans and obliviously ignored the Counter-Strike scene in its entirety. I never even knew Alien Swarm existed until I'd played Half Life, and had become addicted to Team Fortress and understood what was great about Counter-Strike. Few games have surpassed Portal in their excellence, but it was, understandably an experimental game. I wrote a laconic review at this point — after I'd experimented and dabbled in all of Valve's masterpieces.

And although I should've written my review as if Portal was merely a prototype, I found it hard to come to terms with the fact that it was an experimental game, for it was as polished and thoroughly thought-through as the majority of games that are retailed nowadays, but that is exactly what it was.

But Portal was only experimental on one end. We know that it was not the concept of the game being experimented with, its spiritual predecessor Narbacular Drop was not the critically acclaimed success that Portal was, but obviously an impressive enough idea for the blokes behind it get hired. Valve could see it worked, and I don't think you could really refine the idea: it is that simple. Put one portal there, the other there and the two are interconnected, an instant passage between destination A and destination B. Adding frills to that just gives it far too much weight, and I cannot think of a way to break it down into more elementary pieces. The idea was as basic as it could get, yet somehow it had never really been tested before.

Portal was an experiment into how well the game would do commercially. Amongst Call of Duty and Halo (and as I said in my review, Valve's other greats) — a market dominated by the newest shooters — puzzle games have a hard time standing out. Hell, innovative games have a tough time reaching out of the darkness and into the light. There are some games that were both innovative games and puzzle games that have come into the forefront; usually not in the form of physically retailed, boxed-copies but in the world of digital distribution and in independent development, RUSH springs to mind.

But Portal, being an IP of Valve, had to be out on the shelves. It was a multi-platform game. If it had been an exclusively PC game, spamming Steam would've been a feasible option, but this was a commercial experiment and had to be out on the frontlines. On the shelves and in the shops: that's where Portal had to be. Had it not been there, Valve would've got unreliable results. Maybe throwing out Portal 2 a few years later, on the shelves, and then seeing that maybe your audience wasn't based in the Playstation segment of the market, or the Xbox portion — it would've been a financial flop.

But Portal managed to break through as an experimental game that got into the limelight as an accessible and simple game, and yet it had difficulty and it required thought and consideration of the next move. It was of a disappointing length: long enough to entertain and convey and introduce all the mechanics but short enough to be a profitable enterprise for Valve to venture into.

The puzzle game is hardly a niche market or a genre that's entirely welcomed in today's no-brain shooting crowd (not that I have a problem with headshotting people!), but Portal managed to break the ice and fall through into the larger scene through a combination of originality and wit. If developers could just take wonderfully innovative ideas and expand on them, let them go out into the real world with packaging and instruction manuals, maybe we'd see some great games and genres arise from their currently unknown, unheard, unseen statuses.