The Rise and Fall of PBP Chapter One: It Started with a Squid

Our story begins, as Arthur said in the introduction, in early 2014.

Arthur and I were hanging out at my house, and we came across a squid hat, which my family had bought during a trip to Six Flags. We decided to play a game where we were scientists at a laboratory, and a race of headcrab ripoffs parasitic squids was attacking us. Now, the two of us were huge fans of the game Portal, and I was planning on playing the Half-Life games at some point, so we decided that the laboratory was either Aperture or Black Mesa. As neither of us knew a thing about Half Life besides that it took place in the same universe as Portal, we knew nothing about Black Mesa besides that it was Aperture’s rival.

And thus, we chose Aperture. Had we chosen Black Mesa, this would have been Half Life Before Half Life, or HLBHL.

Now, this may seem to be shaping up into the series that we know. However, there are several differences between the original LARP and the stories that Arthur later posted to his blog. For example, it took place in modern Aperture, rather than the 1950s, like the first stories on the blog. In addition, we came up with the idea that a scientist had activated GLaDOS to stop the squids, and then she had gassed the facility to kill the squids, which also killed the scientists. Also, rather than GLaDOS orbiting the Earth for 30 years, then falling to Earth, in the LARP she basically just happened to land in Arthur and Jason’s car. Also, Chell wasn’t a part of the story until the second season.

In addition, the story of the original LARP followed the story of the Portal games much more closely. It was also much more silly and ridiculous. Originally, we moved the story to during the events of Portal 2 by saying that we escaped Aperture and then for some reason had gone through a time warp.

The second season was mostly the same, with the same old zombie apocalypse and Black Mesa bunkers. It revolved around us trying to survive and rebuild civilization.

The first two seasons were pretty dumb, but we were having a lot of fun with it. It was the first series we had done that had a feeling of togetherness.

Then came Season 3, what we consider the Golden Age of PBP. But that’s another story for another time.