Introduction by Arthur Borglestein
PBP. Those three letters bring back so many memories. Mostly bad memories, yeah, but memories nonetheless. PBP is one of the first long-running story serials that I ever did, and it was almost certainly the first to have a coherent plot. The first season all started when Astatanius and I were hanging out as his house one day in the Winter of 2013.
He and I were both fans of the Portal games at the time, and we decided to do a LARP game based on them. We started off with a simple plot involving mutant squids, Aperture Science, Black Mesa, zombies, Chell, GLaDOS, Arthur, and Jason. Arthur was originally a robot who could turn into a human, but I eventually scrapped his robot form and just made him into a dude with a robot arm.
The series’ first two seasons weren’t great, but they were good enough for us to do a third, early into the Summer of 2013. The third season kicked butt. Even today, 3 years later, I still remember that season being some of the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything.
The plot involved two main antagonists: Blathkalgians and Lonely Ones. Blathkalgians were aliens who disguised themselves as policemen and had tentacle arms. The Lonely Ones are the best monsters I’ve ever come up with. They’re dark black humanoids who distort their shape randomly. They come from a parallel dimension on the other side of mirrors and kill people.
We did an episode or two set in a United States Government hangar/experimental aircraft testing facility (we used a local plane museum as the setting for this RP, and managed to stay discreet enough to not embarrass ourselves). The ‘airbase episode’, as we called it, was a classic, and I’m planning to do a similar episode in The New Adventures.
After Season 3, things began to go downhill. Season 4 followed the adventures of the heroes as they fought against the Minnids, a race of evil time-traveling aliens. It wasn’t as awesome as it could have been, but we still had fun with it. Then Summer ended, and the worst school year of my life began.
During this year, I changed, and became a pretty awful person. I tried to be ‘serious’ and ‘dark’. This was partially due to my obsession with ‘The X-Files’, which is generally a pretty serious show. Sadly, that meant that everything that had made PBP what it was was gone. It was a poorly-done X-Files ripoff created by a crazy kid.
I wrote concepts for 70+ four-episode seasons, with fifty in PBP, and twenty in the spinoff series ‘Future’ and ‘Varilum’. These episodes were mainly based around the idea that aliens were trying to colonize or take over Earth, and that the United States Government was helping them. So yeah, it was the X-Files, but written horribly.
About 20 seasons in, I removed Aperture and GLaDOS from the plot. Very few of the series’ Portal roots remained. PBP was now nothing but a crappy X-Files ripoff. At one point, I brought Aperture back, but had Arthur take it over, which, of course, completely changed how the place operated.
In conclusion, PBP was great and I ruined it. Sorry about that.
-Arthur Borglestein
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