As others have said, it’s probably a retcon.
And I’m assuming it was localized because if it was happening everywhere the military wouldn’t bother trying to cover it up.
Lets not forget that this information isn’t coming from the epitome of good journalism, their publication has gotten so much wrong in the past, i find this to be inproperly used language by the writer.
they also seem to misunderstand the difference between publisher and distributor.
I personally don’t even care, it won’t make or break the game, and Valve keep changing the dates of their episodes too.
originally 3-6 months between releases I believe :3
I thought ep 1 was 5 years out from ep2, but I might be wrong.
I won’t believe this until Mark or Gabe says something. It seems pretty damned odd that after 11 years, Mark and all of Valve apparantly decide to change the year of Half Life’s events to 1998 with no real reasoning behind it. It sounds to me like the writer was filling in murky areas of the TL with her own BS. This is further evidenced by the fact that she tells us to look at the Aperture Science Website, which hasn’t been updated in almost 2 years. Besides, who are you going to trust? Valve, who created the games and wrote the storyline, or GameInformer, who wrote an article because they said they were going to do a month of Portal 2 information?
EP1 was released 4 years after half life 2, ep2 was released a year and half after ep1, in the game about 1 day has passed between ep1 and ep2.
This was confirmed to directly come from Valve, read the previous posts! And I really don’t think they will confirm this again.
Furthermore, the Game Informer podcast confirmed that Portal is set a couple of years after the HL2 story arc. That gives more sense to GLaDOS’ words" “All I know is I’m the only thing standing between us and them. Well, I was.” She seems to acknowledge that the Combine has been defeated, but we still need Ep3 to confirm this.
I read the thread. I see no “confirmed by valve”, I saw the person who wrote the article saying that the “information came directly from valve”, but that likely means the whole timelime, not that specific sentence that she decided to add in.
Um, Game Informer cannot confirm something about a story element that Valve has kept under wraps since 2007. I’d like to see the podcast honestly. Game Informer was not told the entire Half Life Storyline just for a few interviews and articles about Portal. As far as I’m concerned it takes place in December 2003.
They said that Portal 2 is set “quote ‘well after Half-Life 2,’” after which point one guy chimed in and said Portal 1 takes place “sometime after some of the events in Half-Life 2,” but I think that this was mere speculation on his part, not necessarily something that came from Valve… at least, that’s how it sounded to me.
GLaDOS’ dialog there can be taken a number of ways, that line could have been said during the events immediately following the resonance cascade, or sometime shortly after Gordon’s awakening, due to the ruckus he was most likely causing outside, or at any point in between, during the Combine’s rule. I suppose she could have said that after the combine were defeated… but, well, if you were an AI designed by humans, with knowledge of a world run by humans, which would you find more strange: A world being taken over and/or run by aliens, or a world back in the command of humans after said aliens have been defeated? shrug :retard:
I don’t think we’ll ever really know exactly when Chell first woke up, since it’s probably not critical information for the events of the Portal series, but I personally think that it’s a bit of a stretch to say that it occurred after the combine were defeated. Oh well… just my 2 cents.
Also, who’s to know that the combine ever actually get defeated…? Maybe the HL2 story arc is a tragedy… we can’t know for sure just yet, until EP3 comes out… DUN DUN DUNNNN! :what:
@ Zoose: Podcast is here. The specific references to the Portal/Half-Life intertwining timeline is around 10 or 11 minutes, if you’re curious.
She did NOT add the last part. She told me it ALL comes from Valve. Plus other dates have been changed, not only the last part. That’s just what she said, maybe she lied, but that would seem absurd.
Thanks Muhb. The guy definately sounds like he’s speculating more than actually explaining what’s going on. And Meagan’s tone (“They didn’t want to confirm anything.”) indicates she may not know about the actual date. But I’m still open to having it in 1998, but it just seems like a big retcon for stuff we have so much info showing that it’s taking place in 200x.
But she DID add the last part. Check the aperture site. No update. Meagen or whatever does not equal valve. Seems like she made a mistake and is trying to redirect attention.
I thought she meant that she got the extra stuff on the timeline direct from Valve, not from the site itself. I don’t see why she’d randomly make stuff up and add it to the timeline.
Are you talking about the release dates of the Episodes? :jizz:
If, then you’re totally wrong
Maybe I just missed something 
Episode 1 was released in 2006, Half Life 2 was released in 2004 and Episode 2 was released end 2007
That’s exactly what she says. Valve just gave her an updated timeline, that’s all!
There’s no way to confirm that.
Why is this so hard to believe, you do relise they were using the primitive portal technology for two years before that experimenting on the xen aliens as it shows in their facilities it wasnt until two years later in which offcial observation areas and facilities were being created for the ‘bigger’ aliens and at that time they were working on the ‘bigger’ stuff when gordon got employed and so makes perfect sense that by the time Gordon was hired in 200X the RC happened as they were getting comfortable with the technology and aliens which of course lead to their mistake…why is this so hard to believe it all makes perfect sense 
silly people…
Yeah I was too lazy to go check the dates, all I knew for sure was that more time passed between hl2 and ep1 than between ep1 and ep2 release dates.