June 10th, 2026
Portal 2 is a game that I hold very dear to my heart. It was one of my longest running hyperfixations in my childhood, and as I've been going back to play it recently, it's sparked that love that 11 year old Nikki had for it.
Portal is still somewhat relevant today, but it's definitely fallen out of the wider public consciousness. I found the series in 2015-2016, when it was already 8-9 years old. I was a bit late to the party, being born in 2005 (two years before the Orange Box released), and the only consoles my family had for a while in the late 2000s/early 2010s was the Nintendo Wii, and my parents' old Xbox and Nintendo 64 (I never played on the Xbox, as I was scared shitless of it. I'd run into the hallway, jump behind the couch or hide behind a curtain whenever my mom would turn it on. I think my childhood fear of the Valve intro would be worse if I had seen it at 7 instead of 11). We did get an Xbox 360 during Christmas 2014, and then I eventually found out about Portal in 2015 when LEGO Dimensions released. Somehow, it took me until 2017 to actually get around to playing the real games.
I rented Portal 2 from the video store we used to have in my town at the time, and I was hooked on the game...though I did have to use a lot of walkthroughs for my initial playthrough. I loved Wheatley so much, and I still miss him to this very day. I actually started making my own artwork because of Portal. I would scroll through deviantART for hours just looking at Portal fanart, and I wanted to be able to make artwork like what I saw. So...if there's anything to thank for me being an artist today, thank Portal! I would make art before that, but I wanted to make serious art. I made at least a hundred Portal comics when I was in 5th grade, though I no longer have any of them (I tossed out a ton of old paper artwork years ago).
My first fanfiction I ever wrote was also for Portal. Like these games had a DEATHGRIP on me for ages. I have to thank Valve for making THE games to be my biggest inspiration as a kid.
I stopped hyperfixating on Portal in high school, when I then moved onto other games like Sonic, Jet Set Radio (which I could write an entire other blog post on) and Splatoon. This year, 2026, while in the process of finally playing Half-Life (which I bought the first game + the Orange Box on PC back in 2020), I've been replaying Portal as well...and I feel it dragging me back in.
As one of my favorite tumblr posts declares, "your 20s is for reliving your childhood hyperfixations", which I would say seems to be true. I'm turning 21 this year, which means that It'll have been almost 10 years since I started playing Portal (which hurts my soul to think about). I don't think it'll have nearly as much of a deathgrip on my brain as it did when I was 11, since I cannot rediscover it all over again, but it's fun to be revisiting the games that had a huge part in forming my personality.All the best, Nikki
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