Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By Quintin Smith on April 15th, 2011 at 4:52 pm.

Only seven minutes left on the Valve’s Potato Sack ARG clock! Join me as I pop open a Coke Zero and stare catatonically at the tumbling numbers, won’t you? I could do with the company, and I’ll be updating this post LIVE as and when anything happens.

Update: If you need something to distract you while you wait, I cannot recommend this link enough.

Update: Less than five minutes to go now!

Update: Two minutes and twenty-eight seconds! Let’s see if I can hold my breath for the remaining time.

Update: no i can’t do it

Update: ONE MINUTE TO GO

Update: HERE WE GO

Update: Haha. Holy shit. Check it out. Glados will be “booting” Portal 2 early if it gets enough “CPUs” playing each of the games in the Potato Sack bundle. So… might we be getting Portal 2 early, but only if we earn it? Man. The “Computations Completed For Launch” is probably the bar to keep your eyes on.

Update: The “Computations Completed For Launch” bar is ticking up! At this rate whatever is going on here will happen in under 24 hours.

@trymasteruk just tweeted at the RPS twitter account saying that by collecting the potatoes hidden in each indie game since the start of the ARG, you can boost your CPU power. No idea if this is true or not.

Update: Thanks to RPS readers Unaco and Hats Al Esman for sending the following in- we now have some specifics on how this works and what can be done to help.

“Remember the Potato Sack? GlaDOS is apparently drawing “power” from
computers playing games in the potato sack. For every collective 48 hours
for one particular game, that game’s “power bar” goes up by 1%. And Steam
needs to record you actually playing the game – just leaving something
idling in the background does not contribute.

The potatoes we all frantically collected can still be collected – in
fact, you are a major contributor if you even collect one potato in one
game. Potatoes multiply that game’s particular power, so if, say, you
gathered 5 potatoes in Audiosurf and one in Bit.TRIP BEAT, you’d be
multiplying EVERYONE’s efforts in Audiosurf by 6x and BIT.TRIP BEAT by 2x.

Some people seem to think that launching multiple games is a good idea.
This is in fact, not helping at all, because Steam only records keyboard
activity in games launched through Steam, not through external launching.”

And here‘s a guide as to how you can get those precious potatoes.