The Death Cube Coincidence

In a previous blog post I talked about Portal: Still Alive (plus its Enhanced version), which features an extremely interesting piece of cut content. The fan-made PC ports of the game prominently include it, however it wasn't until 2017 that it was unearthed.

But first, let's start with some background.

Portal originally came out in October 2007 as part of The Orange Box, a bundle containing three new games by Valve including it, Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Team Fortress 2. For a while the only way to play Portal was if you bought the entire collection that also came with everything else, and this remained the case on the Xbox 360 until 2008.

In 2008 Portal: Still Alive was announced, which was an exclusive for the Xbox Live Arcade. Along with the base game it featured 14 "advanced" chambers which were taken from the Portal: The Flash Version mappack made by WeCreateStuff, though they were altered to more closely follow Valve's design.

Although this included wholly unique levels, they would never see an official release on PC, and so it was Portal fans themselves who saw the need to do it. This would take a while though, as Xbox games are famously difficult to datamine, and even then, the formats for the maps in the game were proprietary they couldn't be used for PC.

Meanwhile, we skip ahead to a seemingly unrelated thing in 2013.

Around this time the Huang Twins, creators of Battle for Dream Island, released BFDIA 5b, an "episode" which was actually a video game, and featured a quick cameo from the Companion Cube. Not the first Portal reference they've made.

This wasn't the end of the Companion Cube's appearances in HTwins games, though, as it also returned in Tidepool as part of the Uber-Evolved set that was added in the June 29, 2014 update.

However, aside from the regular Companion Cube, the game also featured another creature called "Death Cube". It looked exactly like the Companion Cube, but instead of a pink heart in the middle it had a skull and crossbones on a black background.

This object would also appear in the first episode of Battle for Dream Island after their 3-year hiatus, IDFB 1, which came out September 1, 2016.

Now this was just a simple jokey object, it's just a twisted version of the Companion Cube, and that's it. However, just a year later was when an interesting discovery was made.

In August 2017, a team composed of Tyler McVicker, maxx, Jackathan, and PistonMiner finally managed to scrape and publish the levels from Portal: Still Alive for PC. PistonMiner in particular was responsible for converting the assets for the levels and objects themselves into a readable format, and with this comes the most interesting discovery of them all in my opinion.

The advanced levels featured a different button used for dispensing cubes, which had some red lights and a red cube with a skull painted on the button itself. However, when looking inside of the files, PistonMiner found a texture for a cube which had red stripes and the same skull drawing as the button.

And this is the crazy coincidence I was referring to. Even though it looks very different, somehow the Huang Twins predicted the existence of the Death Cube (or Skull Cube as most of the community calls it) three years before it was actually uncovered!

This is most-definitely a coincidence. Perhaps they played the XBLA version of the game and saw the skull pedestal and were subconsciously inspired by it? But that's the only other explanation I can think of and isn't really that likely.

Also while researching I actually found an image from April 2011 (coincidentally from the exact same day Portal 2 came out) of an unfinished fan game called Portal: Outside Influence that had what is essentially a Death Cube in it. It is pretty much the exact same, even down to the fact that it's red, while the Huang Twins' cube was black.

Unfortunately I can't really explain this in any way as well other than it just being another coincidence. Perhaps it was also a subconscious influence from the XBLA port, who knows?

Aside from that though, that's it!

This is just an extremely silly coincidence that I found just as fascinating. Does it have any deeper meaning or anything? Absolutely not. But was it fun anyways? Absolutely.