Quote from NuclearDuckie on July 4, 2011, 8:58 pm

Don't try to take any of this game seriously; you'll just hurt yourself. Portal 2 is set an undefined amount of time in the future because it's supposed to be non-canon as far as the Half-Life universe is concerned. The only link is the Borealis dock and Cave Johnson mentioning Black Mesa.

Quote from ChickenMobile on July 5, 2011, 2:10 am

WinstonSmith wrote:

Will T. wrote:

The "9999999" announcement was a malfunction of the Aperture Science computers. If you listen to the actual sound clip there, the "9"s continue through the duration of the announcement being made, for a total of 55 before the sound clip ends. The number of 9's means nothing.

Thank you.

So much.

(And no, that wasn't sarcasm, I'm serious.)

Phew! I was beginning to think Chell was some kind of well-preserved mute zombie.

Quote from no00dylan on July 5, 2011, 3:52 am

I hear people talk about that 999 thing way too much, doing the math. It's just maxed out or malfunctioning. If it's maxed out, then the most you can find is the least amount of time Chell's spent in suspension... But it's more likely that the counter is broken and freaking out. An unused GLaDOS line says something like 50,000. But there's a dilemma, can you count an unused but still in the files line? Can it even be considered cannon? I don't think so. As for Chell being the daughter of Cave and Caroline, I want to believe it but just can't. I like the theory that Ratman is Chells father more.

Quote from Nacimota on July 5, 2011, 5:26 am

MasterLagger wrote:

... This is not "Baseless Speculation."

Yes, it is.

As others have said above, the nine-nine-nine-nine-etc is a malfunction. I'd also like to point out that while he did say "fifty days", he did not say "five-zero days".

The primary reason I reject a couple of hundred years is because given what we know about urban decay and so forth (from incedents like Chernobyl), it just isn't feasable that Aperture would still be in the state that it is in after that length of time.

It certainly wouldn't be that way after tens of thousands of years. It just wouldn't happen.

Quote from Hober on July 5, 2011, 11:06 am

Nacimota wrote:

The primary reason I reject a couple of hundred years is because given what we know about urban decay and so forth (from incedents like Chernobyl), it just isn't feasable that Aperture would still be in the state that it is in after that length of time.

It certainly wouldn't be that way after tens of thousands of years. It just wouldn't happen.

I had the same reaction, but I figured Valve just handwaved that away in favor of story.

Yeah, for reference, 50,000 years is as long as humans have been recognizably modern. In another 50,000 years, we probably won't even have corporeal bodies.

Quote from MasterLagger on July 5, 2011, 12:25 pm

Nacimota wrote:

The primary reason I reject a couple of hundred years is because given what we know about urban decay and so forth (from incedents like Chernobyl), it just isn't feasable that Aperture would still be in the state that it is in after that length of time.

It certainly wouldn't be that way after tens of thousands of years. It just wouldn't happen.

You reject a couple hundred years even though an employee from Valve said it took place in "hundreds of years in the future"? I remember hearing a Valve Employee say this on an interview. Might have been the G4 interview, I don't recalled exactly when and where it took place.

Quote from WinstonSmith on July 5, 2011, 7:11 pm

Alright first of all just because a VALVe employee says something about a storyline doesn't mean it's true or has even remained an unchanged storyline detail. For all we know whoever was being interviewed just made a mistake. Or said something that wasn't canon-approved. Or whatever. The point is that Portal 2 takes place long enough after Portal that the facility has been truly abandoned, even more than it [possibly] was in Portal. The odds that Chell was actually in stasis for exactly [9,]999,999 days is astronomically low, and if VALVe had intended the announcement to be taken seriously they would have picked some random number. Whether the time gap between the games is 50 years, 500 years, or 50,000 years doesn't matter anywhere except in the specific question of this thread.

Which leads me to my next point. I highly doubt Chell is Cave's daughter. You can argue back and forth about it as much as you want, but when all's said and done, you have to realize that--spoiler alert--it doesn't matter. At all. Who cares if she's Cave's daughter? Does it really make that much of a difference plotwise? No! It's not like the point of the game is to resurrect Cave. Whether she is or not makes no difference in the storyline, and to be quite honest, you're a bit too romantic if you absolutely need to believe there's a bloodline in the story. There's no hard evidence whatsoever to prove that Chell is Cave's daughter.

There's no point in fighting over details that have no effect on the story. Just have fun playing and thinking about the storyline we already have.

Quote from MasterLagger on July 5, 2011, 7:32 pm

Talk about overkilling an argument. Arguing about storylines is fun, even if some of the details are sketchy. I'm glad the storyline is the way it is even though people have to speculate about a few of the details. People are just sticking their ideas up here based on whatever conclusion they made and there's nothing wrong with that.

Quote from rellikpd on July 5, 2011, 7:34 pm

also: regarding the "Valve Employee said it, so it is god sent" is pointless for several reasons. FIRST OF ALL: What was the person who said it's job title? What did they have to do with (if anything) the game?
Valve employs, hardware techs, software techs, artists, programers, game designers, story writers, Public Relations (PR) people, etc etc etc. And when you send an employee to a convention to REPRESENT your product, and your company, you want the person most trained for that to be there. Most likely who ever was at "G4" etc was probably a PR rep, and thus didn't really know anything about the backstory of Portal more than (s)he needed to to sell the "bad assness" of the game.
To quote Office Space: "Engineers are not good at dealing with customers....

Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can't you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!!!!!"