Portal's eerie symbolism was ramped up another notch this week when Valve announced a patch that has gamers playing what seems to be an alternate reality game within the platformer. The update to the game doesn't seem to include much new content at first glance, but what has been added is clearly only the beginning of a much bigger trip down Valve's latest rabbit hole.
Today's announced update was accompanied by a short, cryptic note: "Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations." When you next boot up the game, there is a radio in your cell that broadcasts morse code when you hold it and stand on the red button in the first level (as seen in the video below). It turns out there are a total of 26 different radios in the game now, and they all have morse code.
The game's new achievement, "Transmission Received" is unlocked when you discover the first morse code radio broadcast. Not only that, but the sound the radios make when a radio is thrown into a force field is extremely unnerving.
Enterprising Steam community members rooted around the game files and discovered a new group called "dinosaur" that
contained a ton of morse code audio, as well as some images that seemed to be corrupted by strange data.
Over at the Steam forums, there's a full list of the Dinosaur files, as well as translations and/or posted images with each corresponding filename. This is clearly the first piece of a much larger puzzle, though speculation is running rampant about just what Valve is playing at. Popular opinion points to the update acting as a teaser for Portal 2, which seems logical since the morse translations imply that GladOS is in the process of rebooting. For the moment, though, the game is afoot and players are investigating the mystery with gusto.
