The Combine are a fictional multidimensional empire which serve as the primary antagonistic force in the 2004 video game Half-Life 2 and its subsequent episodes developed and published by Valve Corporation. The Combine consist of organic, synthetic, and heavily mechanized elements. They are encountered throughout Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two, as well as Half-Life: Alyx, as hostile non-player characters as the player progresses through the games in an effort to overthrow the Combine occupation of Earth.
Alyx Vance is a fictional character from Valve's Half-Life video game series. She is introduced as a non-playable, supporting character in Half-Life 2 (2004), accompanying the player's character, Gordon Freeman, throughout much of the game. She subsequently appears in a similar capacity in Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006) and Episode Two (2007), and as the titular protagonist of the VR game Half-Life: Alyx (2020).
Portal is a 2007 puzzle-platform game developed and published by Valve. It was released in a bundle, The Orange Box, for Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and has been since ported to other systems, including Mac OS X, Linux, Android, and Nintendo Switch.
John Patrick Lowrie is an American voice actor best known for voicing the Sniper in Team Fortress 2 and various characters in Dota 2. He has played Sherlock Holmes in the radio series The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes since 2001.
This is the discography of singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton.
Portal 2 is a 2011 puzzle-platform game developed by Valve for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The digital PC version is distributed online by Valve's Steam service, while all retail editions were distributed by Electronic Arts. A port for the Nintendo Switch was included as part of Portal: Companion Collection.
GLaDOS is a fictional character from the video game series Portal. The character was created by Erik Wolpaw and Kim Swift and voiced by Ellen McLain. GLaDOS is depicted in the series as an artificially superintelligent computer system responsible for testing and maintenance in the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center in all titles. While GLaDOS initially appears in the first game to simply be a voice that guides the player, her words and actions become increasingly malicious as she makes her intentions clear. The second game, as well as the Valve-created comic Lab Rat, reveals that she was mistreated by the scientists and used a neurotoxin to kill the scientists in the laboratory before the events of the first Portal. She is apparently destroyed at the end of the first game but returns in the sequel, in which she is supplanted by her former intelligence dampener and temporarily stuck on a potato battery, while her past as the human Caroline is also explored.
"Still Alive" is the song featured in the closing credits of the 2007 video game Portal. It was composed and arranged by Jonathan Coulton and was performed by Ellen McLain, who voiced the Portal antagonist and subject of the song, GLaDOS. The song originated in a meeting between two Valve developers and Coulton about him writing a song for the company, which Coulton accepted as he was a fan of Valve's Half-Life series, which is set in the same universe as Portal. The song was released on The Orange Box Soundtrack on December 21, 2007, along with an exclusive vocal mix not heard in the game.
Matt Conn is the founder and former CEO of MidBoss. He is known for the creation of GaymerX, the cyberpunk story adventure game Read Only Memories, and producing the LGBTQ video game documentary Gaming In Color.
The Potato Sack is the name of an alternate reality game (ARG) created by Valve and the developers of thirteen independent video games to promote the release of Valve's game Portal 2, in April 2011. Valve president Gabe Newell envisioned the game as a "Cross Game Design Event" in December 2010, and allowed the developers free rein to design the game using Valve's Portal intellectual property. The game, requiring players to find and solve a number of puzzles hidden within updates of the thirteen games, led to the opportunity for players to release Portal 2 about 10 hours earlier than its planned release by playing games under the pretense of powering up GLaDOS, the sentient computer antagonist from the Portal series. The ARG's theme of potatoes is based on plot elements within Portal 2, specifically that for part of the game, GLaDOS's personality module is run off a potato battery.
Wheatley is a fictional artificial intelligence from the Portal franchise, first introduced in the 2011 video game Portal 2. He is voiced by British comedian and writer Stephen Merchant, and created in part by Portal 2's designer Erik Wolpaw.
Chell is the silent protagonist in the Portal video game series developed by Valve. She appears in both Portal and Portal 2 as the main player character and as a supporting character in some other video games. Not much is known about Chell but some posit she is the daughter of an employee at Aperture Science Laboratories, the main setting of the games.
Portal is a series of first-person puzzle-platform video games developed by Valve. Set in the Half-Life universe, the two main games in the series, Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011), center on a woman, Chell, forced to undergo a series of tests within the Aperture Science Enrichment Center by a malicious artificial intelligence, GLaDOS, that controls the facility. Most of the tests involve using the "Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device" – nicknamed the portal gun – that creates a human-sized wormhole-like connection between two flat surfaces. The player-character or objects in the game world may move through portals while conserving their momentum. This allows complex "flinging" maneuvers to be used to cross wide gaps or perform other feats to reach the exit for each test chamber. A number of other mechanics, such as lasers, light bridges, high energy pellets, buttons, cubes, tractor funnels and turrets, exist to aid or hinder the player's goal to reach the exit.
Chris Pope is an American internet personality, video game developer, producer, social media professional, podcaster. Pope is best known by fans as the SpacePope.
Portal 2 is a physics-based puzzle-platform game created by Valve and released on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Linux in April 2011, followed by a Nintendo Switch version in June 2022. The game, set in the desolate, labyrinthine Aperture Science facility, challenges the player to navigate test chambers created by the artificial intelligence GLaDOS, using a portal gun, a device able to create portals that link two points in space like a wormhole. The game expands on the original Portal by adding new puzzle elements, such as paint that imparts properties to surfaces, plates that can launch the player and objects over distances, tractor beams and bridges made of light.
GaymerX is an American public-benefit nonprofit corporation based in California dedicated to celebrating and supporting LGBTQ+ people and culture in the world of gaming, with a focus on video games. GaymerX puts on a fan-facing convention with LGBT-oriented gaming and geek culture, or gaymer, with panels primarily focused on LGBT issues and debates in the gaming industry.
Half-Life: Alyx is a 2020 virtual reality (VR) first-person shooter game developed and published by Valve. It was released for Windows and Linux with support for most PC-compatible VR headsets. Set five years before Half-Life 2 (2004), players control Alyx Vance on a mission to seize a superweapon belonging to the alien Combine. Like previous Half-Life games, Alyx incorporates combat, puzzles and exploration. Players use VR to interact with the environment and fight enemies, using "gravity gloves" to snatch objects from a distance, similarly to the gravity gun from Half-Life 2.
15.ai is a non-commercial freeware artificial intelligence web application that generates natural emotive high-fidelity text-to-speech voices from an assortment of fictional characters from a variety of media sources. Developed by a pseudonymous MIT researcher under the name 15, the project uses a combination of audio synthesis algorithms, speech synthesis deep neural networks, and sentiment analysis models to generate and serve emotive character voices faster than real-time, particularly those with a very small amount of trainable data.
The Chalkeaters is an English-language musical group from Saint Petersburg, Russia that composes comedy songs about video games.
