1There was a time when Portal, the first-person puzzle-platformer video game developed by Valve, was everywhere. My younger daughter once dressed for Halloween as Chell, the game’s avatar-character, wandering the neighborhood with a ponytail and carrying a modified Super Soaker water gun as her Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (or Portal Gun). Cosplay like this, fan wikis, the grass-roots popularity of the closing-credits song (“Still Alive”) and the meme-like virality of the catchphrase, “the cake is a lie” — all testify to a robust community of players, fans and critics whose engagement with the game went beyond the game itself and helped to make it a cultural phenomenon after its release in 2007 (boosted by the release of Portal 2 in 2011).
2So it’s fitting that editors Alan Galey, Ellen Forget and Brendan Allen have produced a critical micro-edition not of Portal but of a single paratext of the video game, a functioning retro-style website of the fictional corporation, Aperture Science, with a green-text command-line interface, a blinking cursor and pieces of ASCII art. The edition of this fabricated website includes an introduction, commentary, a collation of multiple versions as well as textual and explanatory annotations. The editors claim this is “the first published scholarly edition of a born-digital work” (Galey, Forget, and Allen 2025). At any rate, it is a carefully conceived critical edition, published in the journal Scholarly Editing. It reproduces in its entirety the fictional website, which was originally implemented in the now-defunct software platform, Adobe Flash, once widely used for multimedia. (The website was previously emulated at the Valve website, as the editors note). The edition is presented as “a playable reproduction […] with added commentary and navigational tools”. It serves as an experiment in how emulation and preservation can be used in scholarly editing of born-digital texts. In this case the editors have encoded the website text in TEI-compliant XML, the results displayed in a modified version of the open-source platform Twine, which provides for a structured hypertextual interface. A panel on the left displays the critical apparatus — commentary, annotations and navigation tools — with links to the reproduction of the ApertureScience.com website on the right. The editors emend the text and correct errors in the original, and collate variants among different versions.
3The ApertureScience.com website was created by Portal’s developers as a promotional paratext linked to the main text: the game itself. In the game, the player could find a useable login and password for the extraneous website, “cjohnson” and “tier3”, providing “admin” level access and additional backstory, by coming across graffiti scrawled on the wall of a relatively hidden space in the game. The corporation is at the heart of the dark (but witty) story, some of which the player may have intuited while navigating the game and interacting with the sentient rogue AI (GLaDOS). But the login scrawled on the wall, along with other semi-hidden in-game information served as a link beyond the walls of the game. Once accessed, the website added depth to the Portal story (and teased the sequel, Portal 2). But it was also “a work of born-digital interactive fiction” in its own right (Galey, Forget, and Allen 2025), leading the player/reader even further outward to an ARG — Alternate Reality Game that connected the Portal game-world to the real world.
4In their introduction, the editors refer to the ApertureScience.com website as “a companion to” and a paratext of the video game. Alan Galey has written elsewhere about paratext in Portal, in his essay contributing to a special issue of Games and Culture that he edited (Galey 2023; see also Jones 2021). As articulated by Gérard Genette (1997), the theory of paratext is a way of accounting for the effect on interpretation of various materials that are not the main text, but which frame or shape our experience of the main text, that serve as “thresholds” to it — in the case of printed books, for example, the frontmatter, blurbs printed on the jacket and, outside the bounds of the main text, author speaking engagements, interviews, or advertisements in various media. The ApertureScience.com website is a threshold of this latter kind, an epitext — outside the boundaries of the main text. It provides backstory and context that changes the player’s experience of Portal. To create a scholarly edition like this one is to take seriously how paratexts of this kind might convey meaning.
5The paratext is a threshold that encourages travel in two directions: both in and out of the main text. It connects the main text to a larger intertextual universe (including, in the case of online texts, the Internet and its boundless textuality) and back again. In the case of a video game, the paratext encourages the player to cross the boundary, to move back and forth, in and out of the game. Understanding the role of the paratext as a multidirectional threshold is especially important when it comes to video games. Games are always part of a larger transmedia universe — including trailers, wikis and discussion boards, “Easter eggs”, ARG, walkthroughs, speed runs, livestreams, user mods and added levels, and so on — constellations of interconnected texts that can only be experienced by moving in and out of the game itself. Indeed, “the game itself” is relative to the player’s engagement. When it comes to video games, a paratext can become the main text — and vice versa — as Mia Consalvo has argued (2017). The relationship between game and paratext is always fluid and ambiguous, and always depends on the player to co-construct the meaning of both the game and its paratexts.
6This meticulously executed micro-edition foregrounds questions such as these by its very existence. But also through a series of astute and well-documented decisions on the part of the editors. (For example, the open source code for the edition is available for download under a Creative Commons license). These began with the decision to produce a scholarly edition of such an obviously external and ephemeral paratext in the first place.
7As textual scholars have long reminded us, any text already contains within itself innumerable possible dimensions of meaning. Textuality is always multidimensional (McGann 2001). Born-digital texts such as video games exploit that n-dimensionality in new ways, often networked and at scale. With Portal, the analogy is hard to resist: the game’s physics and primary gameplay mechanic allow the player to navigate between non-contiguous chambers by shooting circular openings in the walls to create portals, in effect wormholes, interspatial, interdimensional thresholds. You enter one and emerge from another in a wall or ceiling or floor in a completely different room of the large testing facility. The writing on the wall offers a different kind of portal, out of the game itself to the ApertureScience.com website and its connected transmedia.
8Among its other virtues, an edition like this one makes for a useful case study in how to deal with such multidimensional textuality. It demonstrates in practice some of the possibilities for textual scholarship, including critical editions that make available for analysis such textual dimensions. Indeed, this micro-edition of ApertureScience.com addresses a whole range of interesting questions about games as texts, paratextuality and the ways that textual scholarship, including the creation of critical editions, might contribute to the study of video games and other born-digital media.