In a recent interview, Valve writer Erik Wolpaw revealed that he’s fed up with internet memes surrounding “The Cake” and “Companion cubes” originating from Portal. Wolpaw, was the primary writer on Portal and is one of two writing leads in Portal 2.
Wolpaw said,
If you thought you were sick of the memes, I was sick of it way ahead of you.
For instance, cake. I’ve had enough cake jokes.
It was announced at E3 that Portal 2 will be coming to the PS3 with steamworks which also ended up being the “surprise”, quoted by Valve a few weeks before the event kicked off.
Wolpaw later added,
The cubes are in there because they’re a gameplay element, and obviously, GLaDOS is back, but there’s a bunch of new gameplay and we want to tell an interesting new story.
We didn’t jettison everything, but I absolutely do not want to try and resurrect a three-year-old meme. That seems like it would be kind of sad. It’s not a good idea.
In 2006, Wolpaw also won the Game Developers Choice Award for Best Writing for his story and dialogue contributions to Psychonauts while working for Double Fine Productions.
In case you missed out on the E3 gameplay blowout of Portal 2 you can view the lengthy gamplay footage here.