This is the fun stuff for me! I love finishing a game and looking up the things that I missed; Easter Eggs, spoilers, and theories. As I played through the game again, I remembered some of the Easter Eggs, but not all of them. So I wanted to dive in and do some research. I went back to show how to get some achievements and will include pictures an videos below.
This should go without saying, but the following is heavy with spoilers, so if you haven’t played or watched Portal….go do that!!

ACHIEVEMENT: camera shy

There are 33 cameras in all that you can destroy with your portals. Below I have a video walk through, I was sure to look at the chamber levels before continuing so that anyone could reference where I was in the game. Take note that there aren’t cameras on every level, and that some levels have more than one. You should also know that you’ll see more than 33 cameras, but not all of them can be detached. Thos include cameras in chambers before you have the portal gun, and any cameras on walls that you cannot put a portal on. In addition to the video, I’ll include a list of which chambers have cameras and how many there are in each if you feel like trying to find them on your own!

Camera Locations:

Chamber 2: 3 Cameras
Chamber 3: 3 Cameras
Chamber 4: 2 Cameras
Chamber 5: 3 Cameras
Camber 10: 1 Camera
Chamber 11: 1 Camera
Chamber 13: 3 Cameras
Chamber 15: 5 Cameras
Chamber 16: 5 Cameras
Chamber 17: 2 Cameras
Chamber 18: 2 Cameras
Chamber 19: 3 Cameras

ACHIEVEMENT: Transmission RECEIVED

From what I’ve read, this achievement cannot be done until one full play through of the game. There is a radio with a red light on each level (and a few during the escape portion of the game) that you have to pick up and take to a certain place within the level. When you get to the right place, the music should change to static and the red light will turn to green.
I won’t pretend that I didn’t have to look a few of these up, some of the radios are really well hidden! I have a video below for a full walk through on how to get each one.

The cake is (not) a lie

So the cake GLaDOS keeps promising you turns out to be a giant furnace instead. Except you do see the cake after getting dragged back into Aperture Labs and right before the credits roll. A few times throughout the game, you can see nods to the cake.
You’ll come across a few large computer screens during the escape portion of the game. The screens have a lot of corrupted code and what looks like gibberish quickly scrolling up, but if you look closely, you can see ingredients to the cake!
On the screens in GlaDOS’s chamber, there are a lot of pictures quickly flashing by. A few of those pictures are of cake. Also, while you’re holding the Intelligence core, it’ll be reciting the cake ingredients.

The design for the cake is based off of a real cake in the bakery near Valve headquarters. The real cake itself is called the ‘Black Forest Cake’ and is made at the Regent Bakery and Cafe in Bellevue, WA.
The ingredients, according to GLaDos, are:

• 1 (18.25-ounce) package chocolate cake mix
• 1 can prepared coconut–pecan frosting
• 3/4 cup vegetable oil
• 4 large eggs
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 3/4 cup butter or margarine
• 1 2/3 cup granulated sugar
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
  Fish-shaped crackers
• Fish-shaped candies
• Fish-shaped solid waste
• Fish-shaped dirt
• Fish-shaped ethylbenzene
• Pull-and-peel licorice
• Fish-shaped volatile organic compounds and sediment-shaped sediment
• Candy-coated peanut butter pieces (shaped like fish)
• 1 cup lemon juice
• Alpha resins
• Unsaturated polyester resin
• Fiberglass surface resins and volatile malted milk impoundments
• 9 large egg yolks
• 12 medium geosynthetic membranes
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• An entry called: “How to Kill Someone with Your Bare Hands”
• 2 cups rhubarb, sliced
• 2/3 cups granulated rhubarb
• 1 tbsp. all-purpose rhubarb
• 1 tsp. grated orange rhubarb
• 3 tbsp. rhubarb, on fire
• 1 large rhubarb
• 1 cross borehole electromagnetic imaging rhubarb
• 2 tbsp. rhubarb juice
• Adjustable aluminum head positioner
• Slaughter electric needle injector
• Cordless electric needle injector
• Injector needle driver
• Injector needle gun
• Cranial caps
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 2/3 cup cocoa powder
• 1 1/4 tsp. baking soda
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. baking powder
• 1 to 2 (16 ounces each) cans vanilla frosting
• A 20-foot thick impermeable clay layer

Those ingredients, for several obvious reasons, shouldn’t really be used to bake your own Portal cake. There are, however, a lot of recipes out there that mimic the look of the cake and sound delicious. On Regent Bakery and Cafe’s website, they list the Black Forest Cake as “Chocolate cake with custard cream filling and bing cherries. Decorated with fresh whipping cream and chocolate shavings”.

For one of my birthdays (23rd maybe?), my family got me a Portal themed cake with an adorable little cake Companion Cube. To this day it’s been one of my favorite birthday cakes!

Website Login

In Test Chamber 17, there is a Rattman Den (shown in pictures below) that has a login and password scribbled on the wall. You can see the login (CJOHNSON) and password (TIER3) once you move a detached camera on the floor out of the way. The login and password go to the site aperturescience.com, but it’s been updated to no longer need the login and password. You should still check out the site for an adorable little easter egg though!

When aperturescience.com was first put up in 2006 and you could log into it, you were able to put in commands. The most interesting, I think, is when THECAKEISALIE is entered, you would be sent to this page:

It’s presumed that this page was made by Doug Rattmann, the man that leaves you ‘the cake is a lie’ messages throughout various chambers. You can see the relaxation vault that Chell wakes up in at the beginning of Portal here.

Doug Rattman

In the first Portal, there are five Rat Man dens. You can find them in Chamber 16, 17, 18, and the last two in Chamber 19.
There is a lot more to be said about Rattmann; I love his side story! But I’d like get through the Portal 2 walk through before talking about him more.

Bring Your Daughter to Work Day

This is another topic that I want to cover more after posting the Portal 2 walk through. I will say a little though! You can hear GLaDOS mention Bring Your Daughter To Work Day a couple of times throughout Portal. This particular day is the day that GLaDOS was turned on and is also the day she filled the place with deadly neurotoxin. I don’t this is the day she killed everyone, because I know she was turned off at some point and had the morality core installed in her so that she wouldn’t try to kill everyone again. But yeah…we know how that ends.

Black Mesa

Aperture Science is to Portal as Black Mesa is to Half Life. Both games (and companies) are made by Valve. Aperture Science and Black Mesa are rival companies in the same universe and are always trying to out do one another. There are some references to Black Mesa in Portal: there are slides comparing Aperture Science and Black Mesa in some of the offices, and GLaDOS has a line:
“Maybe you’ll find someone else to help you
Maybe Black Mesa
THAT WAS A JOKE
HAHA. FAT CHANCE”
in the Still Alive song during the credits. I didn’t get that joke the first time I played the game, but now that I get it, I love it.

I obviously love this game, but I’m more excited to get back into Portal 2! It’s one of those rare games to me that was not only better than the first, but actually made me love the first more, too. I’ll get to playing and get it posted soon!