{"id":75820,"date":"2026-04-18T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/?p=75820"},"modified":"2026-04-18T08:37:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T12:37:09","slug":"long-before-friendslop-portal-2-made-co-op-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/?p=75820","title":{"rendered":"Long Before Friendslop, Portal 2 Made Co-Op Cool"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\"><em>April 18, 2026 marks the 15-year anniversary of Portal 2&#8217;s release. Below, we reminisce about its memorable story, novel cooperative two-player mode, and enduring comedy.<\/em><\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">There was a time in the PlayStation 3\/Xbox 360 era when Valve was spoiling us with games, packaging some excellent titles in The Orange Box and bringing us back-to-back Left 4 Dead entries. But the company hit a stride with the 2011 release of Portal 2, which might be its finest accomplishment of that generation.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Following up from 2007&#8217;s Portal, Valve would still have had a hit if it had only made and released the single-player campaign, but the developers went the extra mile with the addition of a full-fledged co-op campaign&#8211;which itself would have been an equally worthy sequel to Portal on its own, and in retrospect, was a harbinger for cooperative and social games trending today.<\/p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">That isn&#8217;t to undersell the single-player aspect, which is a huge expansion of the original game. Portal 2 is one of the smartest video game sequels ever, adding new dimensions to puzzle-solving with the special paint mechanics, and memorable characters like the JK Simmons-voiced Cave Johnson. It pushes the narrative forward with a newly cinematic flair, while taking an appropriately<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>April 18, 2026 marks the 15-year anniversary of Portal 2&#8217;s release. Below, we reminisce about its memorable story, novel cooperative two-player mode, and enduring comedy. There was a time in the PlayStation 3\/Xbox 360 era when Valve was spoiling us with games, packaging some excellent titles in The Orange Box and bringing us back-to-back Left&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":116,"featured_media":75822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-external","brand-gamespot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75820"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75820"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75823,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75820\/revisions\/75823"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/75822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vgvote.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}