Timeline for Portal? [SPOILERS]
Precisely. Hopefully Valve makes it a tad less predictable than that. I may have missed something during the game, but I'm really curious as to what those weird giant flying maggot things are that kill Eli.
I thought they have made that pretty clear, those are Combine Advisors. They are the actual "combine", the ones who decided to invade Earth and sent the Citadels and created the Combine Troops and so on. They are the leaders of the Combine.
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If I remember my lore right, essentially the advisors have became telekinetic at some point, either naturally or through some sort of genetic enhancement. (The latter, IMO, seems more likely because, well, they're the combine.)
At that point, all their other appendages got evolved out, and over the millenia they've ruled the Combine, they've used super-soldiers (think the white-suited special forces Combine soldiers) to rule their empire with an iron fist. This obviated their need for any actual physical attributes.
Also, thanks to their telekinesis, they could as easily use a gun as their proboscis to kill people.
I dunno how accurate this is, but someone had taken the time to actually piece together the evens from all of the games to create this timeline.. I read it and its pretty interesting.
Yeah, that's the best and most exhaustive source. It's as close to authoritative as there is, IMO.
Precisely. Hopefully Valve makes it a tad less predictable than that. I may have missed something during the game, but I'm really curious as to what those weird giant flying maggot things are that kill Eli.
IMO, The Combine Advisors seemed to be related to the brain bugs from Starship Troopers, all the way down to how and what they eat :O Maybe the sand bugs in HL2 and the Combine Advisors are the "beginning" of the Bug infestation in the movies :O
J/K I am sure that the developers at valve were strongly influenced by that movie... but wouldn't you like to know more?
I read through his timeline, and I think the author forgot a few important facts, one of which being that the vortigaunts as well as the alien soldiers, the gargants, and other aliens were all under the control of the Nihilanth. The hidden vortigaunt in Half-Life 2 mentioned something about them all rejoicing and watching when Gordon killed the Nihilanth. He wasn't their leader by choice, necessarily, and I am under the impression that the Nihilanth is a hatched and fully-developed advisor, while the floating, mutli-armed aliens that shot fire from their heads in Half-Life 1 are baby Nihilanths(especially since they were supposedly called "Alien Controllers". To me it makes more sense that the combine simply lost control of the vortigaunts, but found another fun race to play with in humanity.
Anyways, that's just my understanding of the storyline. 
Precisely. Hopefully Valve makes it a tad less predictable than that. I may have missed something during the game, but I'm really curious as to what those weird giant flying maggot things are that kill Eli.
I'm still pissed about that. I was screaming at my monitor.. Not because Eli died, I was yelling at Valve for being assholes.. Lol, Eli was inches from explaining some things about GMan! I've been talking about GMan for like 10 years w/ friends and still feel no closer to who he is. Haha. Okay, a little closer, I thought he was a figment of Gordon's imagination, origionally, at least we've proved that theory wrong.
Adrian Shephard had his own dance number with the G-man eight years ago. (Real time)
Based on context clues (it was alluded to 3 times, twice in game and once on the aperture science website), the player is most likely the daughter of one of Aperture employees, brought to work on "bring your daughter to work day." This would put her age at probably somewhere between 7 and 15 at the time GLaDOS initially took over.
Username : cjohnson
Password : tier3
Then, either type DIR for directory or NOTES to go directly to the timeline you're speaking of.
GLaDOS took over "several years later" after 1996 according to the NOTES file on the aperture science website. Since it seems unlikely that the company would have been functioning during or after a resonance cascade, we can assume that GLaDOS took over shortly before the events of Half Life 1, which according to the Half Life Saga Story Guide is the year 2000.
Looking at the player (which outside of a model viewer is easiest to do by putting two portals on a wall at ground level next to each other and climbing half way through one while looking at the other) she appears to be late twenties/early thirties. Assuming she was 7-15 to start, that means roughly 15-25 years have gone by. This means Portal is taking place within plus or minus five years of the events of Half Life 2.
I would guess that it takes place shortly before Half Life 2. This way the unnamed Portal player could potentially appear as a character in Episode 3. Having escaped the Portal facility (which is clearly on land with trees blooming around it and in the distance, so it is probably not on board the Borealis) she could be trying to find the Borealis herself. Perhaps it was her that led Dr. Mossman to it in the first place. Something certainly did.