By John Walker on October 11th, 2007 at 1:46 pm.
Perhaps, like us, after the sheer joy of the Orange Box, you were left with a twinge of disappointment at the lack of the promised song via the Steam version. Well fear not, as it’s already on your hard drive. You just have to know where to look.
Instructions after the word-portal, for those who don’t want spoilers. (RSS readers: run away now).
You’ll first need a smart little app called GCFScape, which can be found here. Once that’s downloaded, install it, and let it associate itself with .gcf files.
Go into your Steam directory, and navigate to ‘Steam\SteamApps’.
In there you’ll see a file called ‘portal content.gcf’, which you can now double-click on. GCFScape will load, and show you two folders in the directory.
Make your way to portal – sounds – music, and there’s the complete soundtrack for the game. That final song, that joyful, wonderful final song, is called portal_still_alive.mp3. Just copy the file to anywhere else on your computer, and listen away on loop for the rest of all eternity.
Then, make your way over to co-writer Jonathan Coulton’s website, and spend some money on his songs.
11/10/2007 at 13:59 Tom says:
lol – love it
11/10/2007 at 14:00 Cargo Cult says:
GCF, not GFC!
You can pootle round all of Valve’s games with that tool – it’s ridiculously handy for us modders.
My next task is finding Portal’s subtitles file, for maximum GLaDOS quotability. It’s probably somewhere like ‘portal content.gcf/portal/scripts/closedcaptions_english.txt’ if anyone else wants to look.
11/10/2007 at 14:03 John Walker says:
Thanks Cargo! Fixed.
11/10/2007 at 14:55 Seniath says:
Alternatively; [snip]
We’d rather not get sued by Valve, thanks -RPS
11/10/2007 at 17:31 Crispy says:
Cargo that’s exactly where it is, (including the subtitles for the developer commentary) ;)
Nice, just finished the advanced levels and to celebrate I’m wacking on all the Portal tracks onto a playlist.
11/10/2007 at 18:33 Tom Reynolds says:
Thank you. Thank you so much for pointing this out. Now I can sleep at night with it on loop on my iPod hifi and have wonderful dreams, dreams about cake.
11/10/2007 at 19:27 SteveTheBlack says:
This is basically the best song in the world. Now I shall listen to it until I die. Ta :D
11/10/2007 at 21:50 TheLurch says:
I don’t have GCF and all that, but i just finished the game and there was the cutest song about being still alive and cake.
It that the one?
11/10/2007 at 22:08 CrashT says:
Yeah that’s the one… It’s a keeper. :)
12/10/2007 at 01:05 Bozzley says:
I’m going to be a wreck in work tomorrow, but it was worth staying up for – that’s the best ending to a game I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been desperate to see what the That Song post was about – thanks very much for the info, I’m chuffed as hell that, no matter how knackered I am in work, I’ll have that song to cheer me up.
And now I’ve developed an obsession with moist cake.
12/10/2007 at 02:26 Beholder says:
Bravo! Thanks for the heads up and such an excellent site in general…
12/10/2007 at 10:51 Seniath says:
Two days on, and I’m still listening to it on near enough repeat.
12/10/2007 at 16:44 Peter says:
Excellent. I’m going to use it as a lullaby for my baby girl.
Did anyone else try to ‘Fix’ GLaDOS BTW? When she first said ‘stuff it back in’ I honestly went up the steps and gave it a go.
13/10/2007 at 04:25 Simon says:
Thanks bunches for telling me how to get this out of the game. I’ve been loading up my save game from the last 30 seconds of the game just so I could hear it over and over.
Best game ending in years.
27/10/2007 at 02:49 The Unshaven says:
I for the life of me cannot find the subtitles/closed-captioning file within Portal, and I’ve had a look around using the utility here.
I’m just incompetent. Does anyone have a copy they can link to, or instructions? I’ve gone looking for it where Cargo said, but there’s no txt files called closedcaption anything.
- The Unshaven
27/10/2007 at 03:19 CrashT says:
Pretty much every VO line in Portal can be found here: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Portal
27/10/2007 at 03:34 The Unshaven says:
Many thanks.
27/10/2007 at 08:41 The Unshaven says:
Just in case anyone else has the same problem I did, a) the wiki has a vast chunk of them, so thanks to CrashT, and b) someone on another forum pointed me at the closed-captions.
They are in:
Portal contents.gcf/portal/resource or similar.
17/11/2007 at 02:48 KBKarma says:
Hmmm. I’ll have to play Portal for a sixth time to get the track numbers. Oh well.
On that note, anyone know where the TF2 music is? I just heard a five-minute-long song at the splash screen using drums, and now I want it.