At Valve’s Portal 2 talk at GDC this afternoon, amusingly titled “Creating a Sequel to a Game That Doesn’t Need One,” Valve writers Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw reflected on their time with Portal 2 and how they went about developing a sequel to the popular original.

“When we tightened the Portal training arc, we still needed something more to entertain returning players,” said Faliszek. “Some of what we did was merely cosmetic,  for example… here’s the Portal 1 elevators, then take a look at the Portal 2 elevators and you’ll see that somehow destroying Aperture Science gave us all new elevators with video screens around them that showed cool little transition movies.”

“There’s no logical reason we have new elevators, but players never questioned it and so our thought was, you don’t have to be a slave to the original, as long as you’re improving it, players won’t care.”

Wolpaw elaborated that point slightly further saying that it doesn’t really matter what you do, you can’t please everyone anyway.

“Richard [Lord, a Valve animator] is a super, super duper smart guy… he designs and animates all the iconographic animations that you see in the elevators and that was in some of our advertising.”

“He’s got a nice voice that people like to listen to. People liked his voice enough that when our first Merchant session got delayed a month, right before E3 where we could debut Portal [2], we thought, “What the hell we’ll just play the Richard audio!” People liked it. People liked it so much that when we got world-class comedic actor, Stephen Merchant in there, there was this small but very vocal section of our fan base that was livid – they wanted Richard back.”

“At the end of the day, that’s kind of a micro cause of the whole problem with sequels,” continued Wolpaw, “With nothing to compare it to, the first version of anything can pretty much stand alone, but once you put a replacement in there there’s going to be someone that prefers it. It’s the law of sequels. You just can’t win no matter what you do. Well, you can win, but you can’t have a flawless victory.”

I think it’s fair to say Portal 2 was a flawless victory though, right? Who the hell cares about the cake!