Portal (1986) — Release Date, Cheats, Price & Requirements

Portal

Portal was an ambitious attempt to tell a story with the depth of a novel and the interactivity of a game, sitting somewhere between interactive fiction and simulation of a computer system.

80 1 November 1986

What Portal is

Portal is an adventure game developed by Nexa Corporation and released in 1986. It was published by Activision. It is available on Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST/STE, Commodore C64/128/MAX, DOS and Mac.

The premise, in the publisher's words

Where are all the humans? Upon returning from your 100 year voyage in the milky way, you find earth empty and abandoned. Between the decaying remnants of civilization, you discover a terminal for Worldnet, the global network that recorded all human activities. The answer must lie deep in its database. Anxious, you log on. Portal is a computer novel - an attempt of creating and adapting a novel specifically for the computer. The story of the boy Peter Devore, his incredible discovery and the mysterious portal are told by an AI named Homer, who reconstructs it piece by piece out of database fragments. As the plot develops, you acquire accompanying information by accessing eleven additional…

Description from the publisher · source

How it plays

It is played from a text perspective. Its themes are science fiction. It is a single-player game with no multiplayer component.

How it was received

Portal holds a critic score of 80 out of 100. That places it above 64% of the 7,525 rated adventure games in our database, which average 72. Games released in 1986 averaged 68, so it scored 12 points above the year average.

How long it takes, and what that costs

The main story runs about 14.9 hrs.

Cheats and codes

We have not confirmed any working cheat codes for Portal yet. Rather than reprint a list we have not tested, this section stays empty until one is verified.

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Portal — frequently asked questions