'We've gotta start Portal 3' - series co-writer Erik Wolpaw
Valve writer Erik Wolpaw wants to start working on Portal 3.
As reported by VGC, Wolpaw ended his appearance on the Kiwi Talkz podcast with a line that would make any longtime Portal fan ridiculously excited.
“We’ve gotta start Portal 3,” Wolpaw said. “That’s my message to… to whoever. I am not getting any younger. We are reaching the point where it’s crazy to think literally going to be too old to work on Portal 3, so we should just do it.”
It may seem slightly bizarre that one of Valve’s employees would need to advocate for a sequel like this. You would assume Wolpaw has some degree of sway, especially since he has written for projects like Left 4 Dead, Half-Life 2 episodes, Half-life: Alyx, and Portal and Portal 2. However, things aren’t that simple.
“Oh, I could advocate for it it might help a little bit, but the problem is 300 employees, and I don’t know exactly the breakdown — how many of them are on the production side versus Steam business side versus legal versus whatever,” Wolpaw explains. “So there’s a lot of opportunity cost to taking 75 people and trying to get a game made. As much as it seems like Valve often just a bunch of people sitting around sipping gin and tonics by a pool, everybody’s working.”
“They’re working all the time, it’s just you don’t always see the , it doesn’t always end up coming out, or it comes out years later, it gets turned into something else. So everybody is accounted for, I guess is what I’m saying. People are all doing something,” Wolpaw continues. “So you’d almost have to take them — it’s like a revolution — stir up a bunch of people to leave what they’re currently working on and come work on something else, in this case it would be Portal 3.“
Valve hasn’t done much with the Portal series since the second installment came out in 2011. The first two games are coming to Nintendo Switch later this year, and Aperture Desk Job came out earlier this year as a tech demo for the Steam Deck.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.