If you own a decent PC, nabbing a copy of 2007’s ridiculously awesome spatial-thought stimulator Portal is a piece of cake, but home console owners aren’t so lucky. The Nintendo Wii crowd already had their turn to be disappointed, but today we learned Microsoft rejected a potential Xbox Live Arcade version of Portal as well.
Speaking to Gamesindustry.biz, Valve’s Doug Lombardi disclosed that while the developer approached Microsoft with open arms, their plans for an XBLA-delivered Portal were rejected:
“We’d love to do that. Right now it’s something we’d love to do. I’d love to sell Portal on Xbox live,” said Doug Lombardi, marketing director at Valve. “[But] the platform holders aren’t doing that right now. There’s a size limit and all kinds of other things.
“We’ve asked them, we said we were open to it. So it’s a decision for the platform holder and how they want to make the games available and how much bandwidth they want to [allow].”
Sure, Xbox 360 and PS3 owners could just go pick up a copy of The Orange Box, but despite its overall quality, the $60 Box is too top-heavy with first-person-shooters to please the mainstream audience. But a standalone, digitally-distributed copy of Portal with no need to analyze system requirements could have more of an impact.
While Lombardi seems optimistic that Portal will eventually make the jump (”We’ll see it one day,” he says) we’re wondering what the hold-up is. The game has obviously been proven to run on the system, and while the standalone game could clock in at over 2GB — according to a quick Pirate Bay sweep — Konami and Capcom have repeatedly proven that XBLA file size restrictions are antiquated.
And if Microsoft is truly aiming for digital distribution of HD movies and beyond, 2GB should be a drop in the bucket.
In other news, existing Portal fans should not expect to see a sequel anytime soon.
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