Hi everyone, hope your doing well!. I have a question about the beginning of Portal 2. I always wondered how many years Chell spent in suspension. I did a lot of research on this while back, but, people say it's between 50 years to 50,000 years, but I'm not quite sure if it's true or not. Was it during Half Life 2? Or was it after Half Life 2? Where is everyone dead already on planet earth? I was hoping some of you might know the answer to the question, or opinions/thoughts.
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It's deliberately left ambiguous. You're not SUPPOSED to know. Valve set Portal 1 in the HL universe because they expected it to be some forgotten little side project, and that gave them a base to build from. But then it became one of the all-time hits. That create problems, it limitswhat they can say about the universe without contradicting HL. They can't get away with outright removing it from the HL universe, no one would let them do that no matter how hard they blatantly try, as evidenced by your question. But what they CAN do is make every entry so far-removed from the timeline that it may as well not matter. So, Portal 1 is generally believed to be shortly after the events of Half-Life 1, give or take a couple decades. Portal 2 is hundreds if not thousands of years later. Completely separated from the HL timeline, and ambiguously so, totally by design. You're not supposed to know where it is because they don't want you to think it matters.
It's never stated explicitly how long the time gap is, we just know that its an extremely long time (more likely closer to 50k years than just 50, given the state of decay the facility is in), its by far the farthest entry in the timeline, long after the events of any hl game
I think you're seriously overestimating nature. You can look at pictures of modern-day Pripyat, which was abandoned in 1986, 36 years ago, due to the Chernobyl disaster, and it's completely overgrown- a lot more nature, overgrowth, and decay than Aperture had. If it had been 50 thousand years, there wouldn't be an Aperture facility anymore. P2 can't possibly have been set any more than 30 years after P1.
note that aperture is underground, so its protected by most of the weathering, that combined with its immense size means it would last a really long time
Well from the test chambers we go through in the very beginning of P2, it looks like they're all close to the surface, and the ceilings on some of them collapsed, allowing nature to get in. I don't really think the lower sections would have gotten as overgrown. So if the rest of Aperture is in pristine condition aside from being entirely inactive, it can't have been more than a few decades.
the rest of aperture was pristine because glados repaired it
Maybe, but we don't know that for certain. We only head down into the lower sections after she wakes up, so maybe they were slightly more pristine than the upper levels to begin with. Or maybe they got cleaner as she took us further down.
"this next test chamber, is looking pretty good, thats right, the facility is fully operational again" heavily implying it was not looking good shortly before
A lot
GLaDOS has a voice line that was cut from her section of testing in the game which has the part "50,000 years is a lot of time to think", which is on the Portal wiki I think. Also I think in an interview someone at Valve also said it was 20,000 or 50,000 years but I dont remember which interview that could've been.