Basically, Valve pushed an update to Portal that added a new achievement having to do with radios placed within the levels. The radios play audio once they are carried to certain points in the game. The audio files were extracted from the GCF and converted to Morse code or images via SSTV. The SSTV pictures when put in order display an MD5 hash: 9459C6CAC8C203B8128B7CC63068D4FD. After some brute forcing and the realization that it may be a phone number, they found "(425) 822-5251." This turns out to be a BBS number. They log in with backup/backup and get text dumps as well as ASCII art. Now everyone is scrambling to figure out what all the art and text mean. Also, there is speculation that the "dinosaur" file names have something to do with this comic. Anyway, it's good times, and there's still a lot people haven't figured out.

Here are some of the images:


Some links:

• Google Wave for this info
• Steam forums thread
• Steam forums thread about the dinosaur references
• The XKCD forums thread
• Youtube Video showing a Valve BBS log in (There are more there as well.)
• The Something Awful Forums thread (There's another thread for members only that I haven't seen.)
• One of the many IRC channels: irc.chat-solutions.org #portal (UBB.Threads doesn't seem to like me using irc://)

Thanks for summing this up. I read a few of the threads on the Steam forums last night, but couldn't find a nice abridged version.

Yeah, it can be confusing. I've been following it from the beginning, and I still don't understand what some people think they're looking for. It seems to me that the ASCII art might just be the end of it.

I'm pretty happy to see this happening now, because clearly it's a ramp-up of the viral marketing for the new Half Life 2 episode.

They hinted in the last episode, and in Portal, that something would happen to link the two games. Some of the images confirm this, showing that the "Borealis" ship (shown at the end of the last half life game) contains bits of technology that we saw in the Portal game.

The obvious prediction is that, in the next Half Life episode, we'll get to use the portal gun as a weapon against the Combine. My guess is that a significant portion of the game will be attempting to get to the Borealis and retrieve the technology; we'll only get to actually use the portal gun as a weapon in the set-piece finale. But that's just my guess.

In any case, I'm very excited because this means that, at least internally, they're counting down to a release.

Exactly. I am excited to see what they do with the next game. It's nice to see they're actually getting somewhere now.

Have been tracking this with interest on steampowered and wave. Can't wait to see what comes out of it. Been enjoying so eof the wilder concepts.

Seems Valve is in full tease mode ahead of announcements at GDC. They also released these images, hinting at their games for OS X.