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This webpage provides the lyrics to a darkly twisted song sung by the computer in the highly-acclaimed and original game Portal, based upon Narbacular Drop.
YouTube audio track at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjGfgV7rJHI
(After the link rots, try search YouTube for The Portal Song
).
[quoted from a post by rowdyoctopus at www.gamespot.com]
Sung by Ellen McLain (voice of GLaDOS and the turrets)
This is a step by step breakdown of the references that make the portal song funny. You probably still will not understand/enjoy it as much until you play the game, but maybe this will help explain why so many people like it. This is my own interpretation based on the game.
You spend the whole game completing puzzles as a test subject with a computer AI talking to you. The AI is singing. At the end of the game you destroy to computer that supposedly houses the AI. Then you hear this part. It is funny because a computer is trying to state emotion.
Aperture science is a high tech private scientific research company in the Half-Life universe. They are rivals to Black Mesa which was the company the protagonist (Gordon Freeman) worked for at the beginning of Half-Life 1. The other lines being funny should be self explanatory. A computer is singing about helping people, except dead people.
Mistakes probably refers to people that ran the tests unsuccessfully before you did. The point was for Aperture Science to make a gun that creates a portal from one flat surface to another, which is the ‘neat gun.’ Keep on trying probably refers to how they kept getting new test subjects to do the puzzles. The cake is a metaphor used in the game. Basically, you are told that if you finish all the puzzles you will get cake. As the game progresses you get the feeling that there is no cake and that you will be killed. Through out the puzzles there are hidden areas that say things like ‘The cake is a lie.’ At the apparent end of the game you will either be incinerated or you can use your gun to get out of it. When you get out of it the Computer promises more cake, but then you begin a trek through the back passageways and observation areas to find the supercomputer and destroy it.
In the boss battle, you use the portal gun to launch rockets at the robotic computer and then throw the pieces that fall off into an incinerator. Apparently killing this thing made it happy for you, almost like a mom being proud of their son/daughter for standing up for themselves.
This is the computer basically talking about how your character making it to the computer room and destroying it was part of the test. It gave them sufficient data and they are ready to mass produce the gun. Another reference to doing things for people that are alive and having no concern for those lost in the process to get there.
You leaving is at the end of the game when you get blown out of the science lab. The computer is basically saying it no longer needs you. As I said before, Black Mesa is the rival company. The reference to the cake is probably a psychological ploy to make you feel like you are missing out by leaving.
Apparently they are not done and there is more to do. The gun might be finished, but there are more helpless lab rats for the company to work on.
Basically the computer assuring you that your efforts were futile and the supercomputer AI is alive and kicking and ready to torture a new batch of guinea pigs.
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