Valve’s deeply influential first person puzzle game Portal will be making its way to Android devices in the future.
Portal, which was released for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2007 (and included in The Orange Box), sees you working through a series of brain-warping puzzles using a futuristic portal gun. This device opens up wormholes through solid walls, enabling all kinds of ingenious spatial and physics-based conundrums.
At the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced a partnership with Valve that would see Portal running on Android-powered hardware.
Of course, that hardware will initially be limited to just one device, the Nvidia Shield. The graphics chip specialist’s bulky handheld console was launched last July, and resembles an Xbox 360 control pad with a 5-inch display stuck on the top.
"NVIDIA has created a very powerful and unique device with SHIELD," said Valve’s Doug Lombardi, over on the official Nvidia blog. "Our companies have a strong history working together and we’re looking forward to Portal’s arrival on SHIELD."
The Shield runs on Nvidia’s own Tegra 4 processor, which hasn’t quite taken off in the wider Android world in the way previous generations of the chip have. More importantly, though, the Shield runs on Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, and that’s where this Portal port’s future becomes a whole lot more interesting.
According to The Verge, a representative of Nvidia told the website that the Portal conversion (which will be handled by Nvidia itself) would initially be exclusive to devices running on Tegra processors. This already opens out the tantalising possibility of Portal on a phone, even if it’s just a limited spread of modern and forthcoming devices.
However, the representative also revealed that the port won’t be technically locked to Tegra hardware. This means that Portal might yet come to the wider Android platform.
Now that would be a rare noteworthy gaming exclusive over iOS.
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