Portal: The Flash Version

On 9 October 2007, a Newgrounds submission from a studio calling itself We Create Stuff put roughly 40 side-scrolling test chambers online, built around a gun that fires two linked portals. Valve's own Portal, the game it was unmistakably imitating, hadn't been released yet — it landed as part of The Orange Box the following day. The two people behind it, Hen Mazolski and Ido Tal, had never played the real thing. Everything they knew about how Portal was supposed to work came from Half-Life 2 and Orange Box trailer footage, which is the specific, slightly absurd constraint this review has to be read against.

Built from trailers, not the game

That constraint shapes almost everything about the design. The team had cameras, crushers, energy balls, storage cubes, turrets, buttons and an electric field to work from — everything a trailer would show off — and comparatively little idea of GLaDOS, the narrative frame, or the exact physics feel Valve had tuned. What they built instead is a pure puzzle gauntlet: pick up the mechanic, walk into a room, work out where the two portals go, move on. According to Ido Tal's own account, published via Armor Games at the time, the team finished the build five hours before their self-imposed deadline, after skipping sleep and school to get there — the kind of detail that only survives because the developers said so themselves, not something this review can verify independently, but consistent with the shipped game's rough edges.

Translating a 3D idea into a side-scroller

The interesting design problem here isn't "can you fire two portals in 2D" — that part is mechanically straightforward — it's what happens to a mechanic built for free 3D movement when you take away most of the vertical axis. We Create Stuff's answer was to clip jump height noticeably below what a normal platformer would give you, which pushes almost every puzzle back onto portal placement rather than platforming skill. Most of the roughly 40 chambers land that trade-off well: you're rewarded for reading a room and placing a portal correctly, not for executing a jump. A minority of chambers don't land it as cleanly, where the restricted jump turns a portal-logic puzzle into a fiddly platforming one, asking for pixel-precise landings the 2D perspective doesn't make easy to judge. Aiming itself is mouse-driven over WASD movement, which is a reasonable compromise for a 2D game but loses some of the confident, ray-cast precision that made portal placement satisfying in Valve's original.

Presentation is where the amateur, deadline-built origin shows most plainly. Chambers are rendered in flat, functional test-chamber grey with limited animation and no attempt at GLaDOS, story beats, or the dry comic tone that carried Valve's game. Ryan Champion's music is serviceable rather than memorable. None of this reads as a failure exactly — a two-person hobby project built in months without a script or a narrative designer was never going to have Portal's writing — but it does mean the roughly 40 levels here are entirely a mechanics showcase, with nothing propping them up once the puzzle-solving itself stops being novel.

From a Newgrounds upload to Valve's own DLC

What makes this game worth writing about twenty years on isn't the puzzle design on its own merits — it's what happened to it afterwards. Within weeks it became one of the top-rated submissions on Newgrounds and was mirrored, according to the developers' own account, across hundreds of other Flash portals; Armor Games' currently live listing puts lifetime plays at 5.7 million-plus with 18,579 user ratings and an 88/100 score (checked 5 September 2026), and the game was nominated for Best Web Game at Zeeby's second annual casual game awards that year. That alone would make it a well-remembered piece of 2007 Newgrounds history.

What's rarer is what followed. We Create Stuff went on to rebuild the flash game's levels as a Source-engine map pack for the real Portal, and — per contemporary reporting at the time, including an AOL games item from July 2008 — Valve adapted 14 of those fan-made chambers into official bonus content for Portal: Still Alive, the Xbox Live Arcade re-release that shipped in October 2008. A fan tribute built from nothing but trailer footage ended up feeding levels back into an official Valve release less than a year later. That's a genuinely unusual trajectory for an unlicensed fan game, and it's the strongest argument for this entry's place in a preservation library independent of how the puzzles themselves hold up.

Playing it today

This is where the honest caveats belong. The game was built in Flash 8-era ActionScript, and it survives through the usual routes: BlueMaxima's Flashpoint added it to its catalogue on 12 January 2019, Newgrounds runs its own in-house Flash player over legacy submissions, and several mirror sites (Andkon Arcade, Flash Museum) serve it through Ruffle. None of that is a clean guarantee. The Ruffle port has a specific, still-open compatibility bug logged as ruffle-rs/ruffle issue #1128 — an endless looping beep sound that doesn't occur under original Flash Player — and when this review checked Armor Games' own listing on 5 September 2026, the site's in-house emulator returned only a "your browser does not support our Flash emulator" message rather than a working embed. The developers' own site, portal.wecreatestuff.com, is still up as a landing page linking out to We Create Stuff and to Valve's Portal, which is itself a small, quiet piece of evidence that the studio still wants the connection remembered. Whether any single route above loads cleanly for a given reader on a given day is genuinely inconsistent right now, which is a fact worth knowing before going looking for it rather than an assumption this review is willing to paper over.

Final verdict

Portal: The Flash Version earns its place in this library on the strength of an unusually clean mechanical translation and an even more unusual afterlife, not on the depth of its roughly 40 single-solution puzzle chambers, which run out of things to say well before the hour mark and give a player no reason to come back once solved. The 7.0 reflects that split: real credit for what two teenagers extracted from a handful of trailers and shipped a day ahead of the real thing, tempered by plain presentation, an occasionally fussy jump-height compromise, and a 2026 playability picture that is preserved rather than solved.