The Rise and Fall of PBP Chapter 4: PBP's Legacy

By far, one of the worst things about working on PBP during “the Dark Ages” was that Arthur almost eliminated any creative control Seanathan and I had. In late 2014, Arthur wrote out concepts for 50 seasons, with five or six episodes in each season (we divided the seasons based on what they were about). In total, Arthur planned 209 episodes of PBP.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, he then decided that PBP needed not one, but two spinoff series.

One was called PBP: Future, which had no difference from the original PBP, so it was pretty pointless. The other was known as Varilum. Varilum took a more “fantasy” approach to PBP. It had some pretty decent concepts. In total, there were 70 five-to-six episode seasons of PBP and PBP-related stuff. And as if THAT wasn’t enough, Arthur came up with ideas for PBP merchandise. Even though he had some cool ideas for merch (which he called “morch” for some reason), Seanathan and I were burned out on PBP.

In February of 2015, Arthur began a short story blog. You’ve probably seen it if you’re reading this blog, but just in case, click here (link). In its early days, the blog was far removed from what it is now. It was mostly LEGO fan fiction stories, along with some old Electroshock stories. In a February 10, 2016 blog post, shortly before the blog’s one-year anniversary, Arthur described his blog in its early days as “a simple thing with (an) atrocious orange background”

However, this is a story about PBP, not Abe’s blog. In March 2015, Arthur decided to chronicle the events of PBP in a short story format, with the first story debuting on March 4, 2015. We found it recently, and it’s pretty cringe-worthy. Who knows, maybe I’ll post it someday.

I should probably point out at this point, PBP had become a convoluted mess. We didn’t really have much knowledge of the Half-Life/Portal universe when we started PBP, but Arthur wanted it to remain part of the universe, and constantly came up with ridiculous and stupid ideas to keep PBP in the games’ canon. At one point, he declared that the universe “reset” in the 2020s, because Arthur built a “Reset Bomb”, whatever that was.

Arthur’s 7th grade year ended in June 2015. He quickly became a much less awful person, and, for the first time in a long time, I was actually enjoying doing PBP.

In the Summer of 2015, the vestiges of the Dark Ages quickly vanished. Our obsession with PBP soon followed. The last episode we played out was the Final Battle: Part 1. It was the penultimate episode of Season 11, where an evil scientist reanimated dinosaurs, because. . . I guess he was EVIL. The last PBP-related thing we did was a play-out of PBP Season 1.5, a shameless X-Files ripoff that he had written for his blog in late 2015. The main reason for PBPs neglect was because Arthur was busy creating a roleplaying game by the name of Zephyrquest II. I’m sure Arthur has posted quite a bit about ZQ’s origins, but to make a long story short, the original Zephyrquest was a LARP that Abe and his friends had played in Summer 2014, shortly before PBP took over everything.

The PBP stories continued on Arthur’s blog until finally, even he became fed up with the series. He attempted to reinvent the series in July 2016, with no success. In the end, he fully vanquished the series from his blog on October 3, 2016. The almost-three year saga had ended. None of us even wanted to think about PBP, as it was associated with so many bad memories.

Until October 2016. I rediscovered the old PBP stories around then, and happily classified them as “so bad they’re good” At my request, Arthur shared the document that he had put the episode descriptions so long ago, and he, Seanathan, and I had a good laugh over them. As we read, we discovered a few diamonds in the rough, and realized that pouring our hearts into PBP over the course of two years had made some amazing concepts, such as the Lonely Ones.

Thus, we decided to make PBP as it should have been, a goofy, creative series of stories. Today, this is known as the New Adventures of Arthur Borglestein.

So there you have it. The entire history of PBP. Hopefully, Arthur can write a conclusion. Also, Seanathan and I are writing a script of PBP. We’re currently debating how to adapt this script, I’m thinking of drawing a comic about it.

~Astatinius

The Rise and Fall of PBP Chapter 3: The Bottom of the Barrel

Arthur, Seanathan, and I refer to Arthur’s 2014-2015 school year as “the dark ages”, and we had a good reason for it.

Arthur was bullied constantly that year. Thus, he was constantly miserable and angry, and his imagination developed a darker streak. For PBP, this meant a dramatic change in the winds.

Arthur had begun to watch the TV show “The X-Files” in Summer 2014, which was where he got the idea for Aperture Sleuths, A.K.A: The stupidest idea ever. As an X-Files fan, he wanted PBP to be more like it. However, the X-Files generally takes itself very seriously, while PBP at the time was a lighthearted, quirky comedy.

At one point while we were acting out an episode, Arthur told me to pump out all the jokes I could. When I asked him why, he responded “Because PBP is going to become more serious, and we need to get rid of all the jokes now.” When I asked why we were eliminating humor from PBP, he replied simply “Because I like serious things now.”

In Aperture Sleuths, we ripped off the X-Files, among other things, quite a bit. That was nothing compared to what we did in Episode 26, the first episode of PBP Season 5. We outright stole the Black Oil parasite from the X-Files. Just read this episode description he wrote: 26.Black Oil: The Oracle, Seanathan, completes his duty as Oracle for a mysterious alien parasite. Meanwhile, Arthur is having parent issues when he finally meets his parents.

The subplot of the episode, where Arthur meets his parents (apparently, he was stolen by the evil orphanage), brings us into the second change in PBP. In addition to the LARP becoming more serious, the series became much less fun to produce. Arthur was constantly criticizing everything we were doing, and yelling at us. I got into the habit of dreading going to his house. Once, during PBP: The Movie 3 (more on it later), I was bored of being serious and was skipping around. Here’s the exchange between Arthur and I.

Arthur: [Astatinius], STOP SKIPPING!

Me: Why?
Arthur: It’s costing us trillions of dollars in CGI!

I think that the reason Arthur bossed us around so much is, because he was bullied so much, he just wanted a sense of power. In any case, production became a nightmare.

After the episode Black Oil, Arthur decided that the new villain of PBP would be demons. Because why not? I should also point out: at this point, the series had nothing to do with Portal. Aperture was gone, and the only link besides the name was the addition of GLaDOS, and a few cameos.

Then, came PBP: The Movie 3. In my opinion, this was easily the stupidest of the PBP movie trilogy. An evil villain named the Pi Killer is on the loose. Why is he called the Pi Killer? He kills people by burning 𝛑s into their dwellings. There was also an army of demons in there somewhere, and everybody in Michigania joined together with Arthur to fight the demons. It was supposed to be the series finale, but Arthur had no mercy in his heart.

There was a plot twist, where due to a neurotoxin leak, everybody had passed out, and had collectively dreamed everything except the first season. M. Night Shyamalan, eat your heart out! This was Arthur’s lame attempt to satisfy my want for the series to return to Aperture.

Thus began the sixth season, which was even more unoriginal than the last. Arthur was now simply lifting ideas from conspiracy and legend websites, and pasting the “characters” into them. I put ‘characters’ in quotes because nobody had any personality. GLaDOS was the flattest character ever, Chell was a generic tomboy, my character was a generic inventor, and Arthur was a jerk with a huge ego.

The first episode of Season 6 involved a ghost only visible by thermal imaging haunting Arthur. It was a kind of creative idea, and I think it was the only episode in that series with an original premise. Then, we investigated UFOs in Stonehenge, the Nazca Lights, and the Australian Black Mountain. It was as stupid as it sounds.
Seasons 7 and 8 were similar. Out of episodes 34 to 41, only four episodes were original.

Though there were more original ideas in Season 9, they were pretty stupid. For example, in Episode 45, Wheatley’s evil clone, Oatley, takes over Aperture. Then, there was Episode 44: Rats.
If you’ve played the Portal games, you probably know about Doug Rattmann, a schizophrenic Aperture scientist who tried to help Chell escape Aperture. There’s a comic about him called Lab Rat, that’s clever, funny, and actually sort of emotional.

Well, according to PBP, Rattmann was actually a deranged robot.

In Season 10, we went back to ripping off, with the Illuminati invasion of Michigania. It was probably the best of our rip-offs. In it, the Illuminati take control of the minds of the Michigania city council, and order the construction of a massive pyramid. Then, the pyramid is revealed to be a power source that mind-controls every Michiganian except Arthur, Seanathan, and I, because, plot convenience. I actually had a lot of fun with Season 10. It was the first time in awhile that I was having fun with PBP.

Around this time, Arthur started his blog, and began chronicling PBP in a short story format. Meanwhile, the LARP was coming to an end.

The Rise and Fall of PBP Chapter 2: Lonely Ones, Blathkalgians, and More

In the Summer of 2014, we began the third season of PBP. I should probably mention that we decided to make this LARP flow in a television-style format, with episodes and seasons. Arthur did this thing where he pretended that there were invisible cameramen following him around wherever he went, and when we played outside, we were acting for a TV series.
But more on that later. Arthur and I both consider PBP Season 3 to be the greatest season of the entire series.


This season introduced the Blathkalgians. They were these tentacled aliens that worked for the government, and disguised themselves as police officers. In the episode, Arthur, Chell, GLaDOS, and I were kidnapped by the Blathkalgians, and were taken to a government base where experimental aircraft were tested. In reality, the “base” was an aviation history museum in a nearby city. At this base, we found a race of monsters called “the Lonely Ones.” As Arthur stated in his intro, the Lonely Ones were the greatest monsters he had ever come up with.

The idea behind the Lonely Ones was that mirrors were actually portals into another dimension, and the Lonely Ones could access our universe through these portals and attack people. See Arthur’s story "The Lonely God", for a better description.

Although the rest of Season 3 never quite matched the amazingness and scale of the “Airbase episode”, it was still fantastic.

Both of us were excited as heck about PBP. It was unlike anything we had ever created before. No other universe we had created was this vast and grand.


As the Summer wound to a close, we decided to make “PBP: The Movie.”It revolved around everybody forgetting about Arthur, while the orphanage he had lived in as a child hunted him down with helicopters and tanks. Apparently, the orphanage was actually a military organization, probably like the IDC
This probably sounds like the dumbest idea ever. And truth be told, it was. However, I can see where it could have been a great comedy, which would have fit perfectly with PBP’s silly, comedic tone.
However, Arthur wouldn’t hear of that. He wanted the movie to be serious and dramatic.

As you can see, I wrote that part in Comic Sans, a font that’s anything but serious. That’s because we didn’t know how to do drama. At all.

I consider this to be the beginning of the official downfall of PBP.

After the movie, Arthur decided that PBP needed a spinoff series. Now, around this time, Arthur had begun watching the X-Files. So, we naturally needed to incorporate that sort of stuff into the Portal universe, right? And Aperture Sleuths was born!
It’s had to think of a part of PBP more out of place than Aperture Sleuths. In this thankfully short-lived spin-off, Arthur decides to turn Aperture into a detective agency because reasons. Then, the entire Aperture facility is moved to London because reasons. It was a melting-pot of ripping off not only the X-Files, but also bits of Sherlock Holmes and Scooby Doo.

This also began a trend that would impact PBP until its dying days, where the episodes were not centered around our own creative ideas, but rather monsters and stuff from conspiracy theories and myths that Arthur found on the Internet.

When Arthur realized that Aperture Sleuths was the worst thing ever, he had Seanathan and I start production on a sequel to PBP: The Movie 2. It introduced the Minnids: time-bending aliens. In the movie, they kidnap the Galactic Council, and Arthur fights back to free them. You’re also probably noticing that the series is moving further and further from its Portal roots. Season 4 mainly centered around the Minnids as well.
Even though the Minnids were pretty good villains, we didn’t do much with them. Villains now followed a particular formula. Introduce a villain for the heroes to fight, then have them fight more and more of them, then take out the boss. Sounds more like a videogame synopsis than a LARP.

As Season 4 finished, school began. That school year was the worst of Arthur’s life, and he continued to try and make his stories dramatic , dark , edgy and serious. This would result in Season 5, where we truly scraped the bottom of the barrel.

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.

The Rise and Fall of PBP: Introduction

Sorry about the lack of stories. I was having computer trouble. . .

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