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Five-Star Fridays
Friday, November 6th, 2009“Still Alive,” by Jonathan Coulton.
This song is apparently about a video game. I have no idea what he’s talking about most of the time. But I love it. Also, he mentions cake.
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It’s from the game “Portal” wherein one, at the urging of a sentient, but crazy computer run through a series of challenges solved by the creative use of a gun that shoots entry and exit wormholes — ‘portals’ — that you can run or push things through.
The game’s littered with twisted humor, including frequent references to the cake that’s waiting for you and the growing realization that the computer is both in love with you AND trying to kill you at the same time.
Portal is therefore the perfect metaphor for life.
Ah! I should have included a link to the trailer. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a video has thousands of pictures!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluRVBhmf8w
Yup.
And that the song is the whole “computers will rationally sacrifice a few to save many” justification.
Portal is great, and only a few hours of commitment.
I think I like this cover more than the original:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvbBekjxQUw
The cake is a lie!
Methinks Radley needs to stop all this work on police raids and bad forensic pathologists and start playing some games.
You beat me to it!
There is an interview somewhere (probably on youtube) with the woman who sings this song and also does the voice acting for Portal. It was apparently no small task singing the song in a way that the words remain intelligible after the alteration.
The theme to Mirror’s Edge is also called “Still Alive,” and it’s pretty good too. The story in Mirror’s Edge involves problems with government power and surveillance, by the way, so it should appeal to readers of this blog.
The song has been parodied dozens of times. Hmm … Perhaps there should be a parody sung by a cop after an unnecessary SWAT breakin that gets people killed.
OMG, it would work. And with not that many changes to the original!
portal was the best game, on any platform, since mariokart for the n64. straight up.
nice choice, radley
The game ended with you killing (or apparently killing) GLaDOS (the computer whose voice is singing the song) and blowing up the entire compound – this makes the opening lyrics “this was a triumph” especially counter-intuitive.
The gun you make is, as others have noted, a wormhole shooter – basically, you shoot two surfaces, and you can now walk between these points as if there was a door between them.
As their point is to test the gun, your life is expendable (there are indeed many hints in the game that you are far from the first person to test this gun). Eventually, you escape and kill GLaDOS by tearing off, and throwing into a trash furnace, hardware modules from her central site that are pieces of her personality, until you’ve destroyed her entire person piece-by-piece.
The whole “still alive” repetition at the end is especially sinister given how horrible and seemingly complete that awful death was – equivalent of someone tearing off pieces of your brain, taking away your ability to function, while you fought against them with all your strength for your life.
If you get a chance to play Portal, definitely do it. It’s an extremely short game as they go these days (it probably shouldn’t take more than 3-5 hours of total game play to win it), but is definitely an innovative take on the puzzle game combined with a first person shooter (only in the sense that you’re shooting the portal gun).
Here is the wikipedia entry on it, which will hopefully make the lyrics make a bit more sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_%28video_game%29
The Black Mesa reference always cracks me up because it’s a reference to Valve’s most famous game Half-Life.
The Cake is a LIE!
Don’t believe them. If you lack manual dexterity or hand-eye coordination, you might easily get sucked in and spend the rest of your life playing the game. :)
Of course, the cake makes it all worth it.
Careful about playing it now, tho. You might end up like this guy.
http://xkcd.com/606/
You’re evil. ;-)
…and the song is in Rock Band! Always a favorite at parties along with the other two JoCo tracks – “Skullcrusher Mountain” and “Re: Your Brains”.
Portal’s a short game, but I had so much fun playing it.
Spoiler yes, but with all the spoilers above this, it doesn’t do much to hide it… one of the best parts of the game is GlaDOS talking to you/insulting you/trying to kill you as you destroy parts of her circuitry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl_-QxbRzts
Those nice men in SWAT uniforms breaking down the wrong door (yours) just want to escort you to a party. With cake!
“Stop what you are doing and assume the party escort submission position.”
The cake is NOT a lie!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5QveX3-1O8
(I love this game…)
It’s a testament to how great this song is that Radley enjoyed it without having any idea what it was about.
Portal is one of the greatest games of the past decade by the way. It’s the kind of thing I would recommend to people who aren’t gamers but maybe want to get into gaming.
@Kit Smith: Aperture Science is actually a private sector competitor to Black Mesa. If you look around the offices toward the end, you can see power-point slides discussing how to get more grant money, etc. Also, GLaDOS makes several references to how bad things are outside, and hints that she believes that she is actually trying to help in some way. And if you’ve played the latest Half-life episode, you’ll find out that a missing Aperture Science research vessel has been located and the player will likely be going there in the next episode. I would not be surprised if GLaDOS makes an appearance.
Short Version: HL and Portal exist in the same universe, and are part of the same story.
A somewhat alternate interpretation of Portal I like: Glados is a sentient computer stuck in an abandoned complex that’s become suicidal. It’s programming prevents it from being openly self-destructive, so it has been repeatedly activating clones and then attempting to provoke them into killing it. You’re playing the first such clone to actually succeed. At which point Glados discovers that it’s also self-reconstructing.
The finaly song is basically its expression of despair at this discovery, being expressed ironically because that’s the only way Glados can express it.
Another good Portal inspired song:
“The Device has been Modified” by Victims of Science
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuYT-d_fxpE
Portal was one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s cheap, and not much of a time investment. Definitely worth everyone’s while.
It just dawned on me that GLaDOS is the polar opposite of Mike from Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I could totally see him as twisted inspiration for GLaDOS.
Yep…what everyone else already said: great game, interesting concept, fun and quirky aesthetic environment.
Oh, and BYOC (bring your own cake!)
Best five-star Friday so far!
Oh, how I love Portal. I was just thinking of re-playing it, too. I guess this makes my mind up, then, huh?
Portal is a great game. Valve put up a free demo of it here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/410/
But if you’re going to buy it, then just get ‘The Orange Box’ for $10 more so you get Half-Life 2, which is also phenomenal.
I think it’s been adequately explained, above, but my first thought on reading the description was “‘Still Alive’ is ‘about a video game’ like ‘Singing in the Rain’ is ‘about a movie’”.
That song’s on Rock Band II. Hard to sing, haha.
My son and I had the privilege of seeing Mr. Coulton do this live at PAX in Seattle in early September.
The game is great, the song is great, and if you like this song you should check out his other work. He’s talented, and if you’re a geek at all you’ll appreciate much of it.
One of the more disturbing takes on GladOS yet:
http://www.game-ism.com/2008/04/04/still-alive-shes-free/