title: Tom Cotton

text: In October 2019, local authorities charged James Powell, a 43-year-old Arkansas resident, with "first-degree terroristic threatening" after an investigation by U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI. The felony charge carries a maximum six-year prison sentence and $10,000 fine. Powell also threatened Arkansas Representative Rick Crawford with death. In January 2020, 78-year-old Henry Edward Goodloe was sentenced to two years' probation for sending Cotton a threatening letter and a package containing white powder. Goodloe admitted to mailing an envelope containing white powder to Cotton's office, with a note stating, "You ignored me. Maybe this will get your attention." The Senate mail facility intercepted the letter, which included Goodloe's home address, and alerted a hazardous response team which determined the powder was unbleached flour and starch.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton was reelected, defeating Libertarian challenger Ricky Dale Harrington Jr. Though Cotton outperformed President Donald Trump in the concurrent presidential election by 4.1%, the election saw an undervote of 26,000 compared to the presidential election. Harrington's 33.5% finish is the best ever for a Libertarian candidate in a U.S. Senate election by vote percentage, surpassing the previous record set in 2016 in Alaska, and also by total number of votes (399,390, surpassing the previous record of 369,807 set by Michael Cloud in Massachusetts in 2002). Per exit polls, this largely appears to be due to many Democrats voting for Harrington as there was no Democratic candidate on the ballot (82% of Democratic voters backed Harrington).


title: Tom Cotton

text: In February 2015, Obama renominated Cassandra Butts, a former White House lawyer, to be the United States ambassador to the Bahamas. Her nomination was blocked by several senators. First, Ted Cruz placed a blanket hold on all U.S. State Department nominees. Cotton specifically blocked the nominations of Butts and ambassador nominees to Sweden and Norway after the Secret Service leaked private information about a fellow member of Congress, although that issue was unrelated to those nominees. Cotton eventually released his holds on the nominees to Sweden and Norway, but kept his hold on Butts's nomination.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Butts told "New York Times" columnist Frank Bruni that she had gone to see Cotton about his objections to her nomination and said he had told her that because he knew that Obama and Butts were friends, it was a way to "inflict special pain on the president", Bruni said. Cotton's spokeswoman did not dispute Butts's characterization. Butts died on May 26, 2016, still awaiting a Senate vote.


title: Tom Cotton

text: During Trump's presidency, Cotton was characterized as a Trump loyalist. He frequently met with Trump's staff during the transition period, and according to Steve Bannon, suggested John F. Kelly as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security. Bannon told "The New Yorker" in November 2017, "Next to Trump, he's the elected official who gets it the most—the economic nationalism. Cotton was the one most supportive of us, up front and behind the scenes, from the beginning. He understands that the Washington élite—this permanent political class of both parties ... needs to be shattered." In the same article, Karl Rove, a senior figure in the George W. Bush administration, said Cotton was a more consensual figure than someone like Bannon.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In a CNN interview shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Cotton denied that waterboarding is a form of torture. He said "tough calls" such as allowing it were an option Trump was ready to take: "If experienced intelligence officials come to the President of the United States and say we think this terrorist has critical information and we need to obtain it and this is the only way we can obtain it—it's a tough call. But the presidency is a tough job. And if you're not ready to make those tough calls, you shouldn't seek the office. Donald Trump's a pretty tough guy, and he's ready to make those tough calls". During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said the United States should resume the use of waterboarding.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In September 2020, Trump shortlisted Cotton as a potential Supreme Court nominee, but ultimately chose Amy Coney Barrett instead. With less than two months to the next presidential election, Cotton supported an immediate Senate vote on Trump's nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy caused by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death. In March 2016, Cotton refused to consider Obama's Supreme Court nominee during a presidential election year, providing his rationale with these questions: "Why would we cut off the national debate on the next justice? Why would we squelch the voice of the populace? Why would we deny the voters a chance to weigh in on the makeup of the Supreme Court?"


title: Tom Cotton

text: In early January 2021, Cotton announced he would not support any attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election during the joint congressional certification of Electoral College results on January 6, 2021.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton is considered politically conservative. The American Conservative Union's Center for Legislative Accountability gives him a lifetime rating of 86.06.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton drew scrutiny for columns he wrote for "The Harvard Crimson" about race relations in America, calling Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton "race-hustling charlatans" and saying race relations "would almost certainly improve if we stopped emphasizing race in our public life."


title: Tom Cotton

text: In 2016, Cotton rejected the claim that too many criminals are being jailed, that there is over-incarceration in the United States, as "Law enforcement is able to arrest or identify a likely perpetrator for only 19 percent of property crimes and 47 percent of violent crimes. If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem". Cotton said that reduced sentencing for felons would destabilize the United States, arguing that "I saw this in Baghdad. We’ve seen it again in Afghanistan."


title: Tom Cotton

text: In November 2018, while arguing against a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill, Cotton incorrectly said that there had been no hearings on the bill. PolitiFact stated Cotton had "ignored years of congressional debate and hearings on the general topics of the bill, as well as the consideration and bipartisan passage of largely similar bills at the House committee level, by the full House, and by the Senate Judiciary Committee." Arguing against the bill in question, the FIRST STEP Act, Cotton asserted that "convicts of certain sex-related crimes could accrue credits making them eligible for supervised release or 'pre-release' to a halfway house". A spokesperson for Mike Lee responded that "just because a federal offense is not on the specific list of ineligible offenses doesn't mean inmates who committed [a] non-specified offense will earn early release". The bill passed 87–12 on December 18, 2018. Cotton voted against it.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Following the murder of George Floyd, Cotton rejected the view that there is "systemic racism in the criminal justice system in America". Amid the ensuing protests, Cotton advocated on Twitter that the military be used to support police, and to give "no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters." In the military, the term no quarter refers to the killing of lawfully surrendering combatants, which is a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Cotton subsequently said that he was using the "colloquial" version of the phrase and cited examples of Democrats and the mainstream media using the phrase.


title: Tom Cotton

text: A few days later, "The New York Times" published an opinion piece by Cotton titled "Send in the Troops", arguing for the deployment of federal troops to counter looting and rioting in major American cities. Dozens of "Times" staff members sharply criticized the decision to publish Cotton's article, calling its rhetoric dangerous. Following the negative response from staffers, the "Times" responded by saying the piece went through a "rushed editorial process" that would be reexamined. Editorial page editor James Bennet resigned days later. Cotton criticized the "Times" for retracting his piece, saying, ""The New York Times" editorial page editor and owner defended it in public statements but then they totally surrendered to a woke child mob from their own newsroom that apparently gets triggered if they're presented with any opinion contrary to their own, as opposed to telling the woke children in their newsroom this is the workplace, not a social justice seminar on campus".


title: Tom Cotton

text: In July 2020, Cotton introduced the Saving American History Act of 2020, proposed legislation preventing the use of federal tax dollars for the teaching of The 1619 Project, an initiative of "The New York Times". In an interview with the "Arkansas Democrat-Gazette", Cotton said of slavery, "As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction." Joshua D. Rothman, a history professor at the University of Alabama, responded that slavery was neither "necessary" nor on the way to "extinction" when America was founded, because it "was a choice defended or accepted by most white Americans for generations, and it expanded dramatically between the Revolution and the Civil War".


title: Tom Cotton

text: 1619 Project director Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted: "If chattel slavery—heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit—were a 'necessary evil' as @TomCottonAR says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end." Cotton responded, "more lies from the debunked 1619 Project" and said he was "not endorsing or justifying slavery" because he was relaying what he believed were the "views of the Founders". Georgetown University historian Adam Rothman said Cotton's phrase is "really a kind of shorthand way of describing the complex set of attitudes of the founding generation and it's not really accurate." "Of course slavery is an evil institution in all its forms, at all times in America's past, or around the world today," Cotton said on Fox News on July 27.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton was one of six Republican senators to vote against advancing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which would allow the U.S. Justice Department to review hate crimes related to COVID-19 and establish an online database.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In January 2019, Cotton was one of 31 Republican senators to cosponsor the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, a bill introduced by John Cornyn and Ted Cruz that would grant individuals with concealed carry privileges in their home state the right to exercise this right in any other state with concealed carry laws while concurrently abiding by that state's laws.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton has an A rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA), which endorsed him in the 2014 election. The NRA's Chris W. Cox said, "Tom Cotton will always stand up for the values and freedoms of Arkansas gun owners and sportsmen." In response to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, Cotton said that he did not believe any new gun control legislation would have prevented the shooting.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton's 2012 campaign website stated, "We cannot afford to grant illegal aliens amnesty or a so-called 'earned path to citizenship.'"


title: Tom Cotton

text: In July 2013, after the Senate's bipartisan Gang of Eight passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, an immigration reform proposal, House Republicans held a closed-door meeting to decide whether to bring the bill to a vote. Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan spoke at one podium arguing for its passage; Cotton spoke at another arguing against it, even exchanging terse comments with Speaker Boehner. The House decided to not consider the bill. Cotton supported Trump's 2017 Executive Order 13769 prohibiting immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.


title: Tom Cotton

text: On February 7, 2017, in the presence of President Trump, Cotton and Senator David Perdue proposed a new immigration bill, the RAISE Act, which would limit the family route or chain migration. The bill would set a limit on the number of refugees offered residency at 50,000 a year and would remove the Diversity Immigrant Visa. Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain expressed opposition to the bill.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton, a supporter of Trump on immigration, was present at a January 11, 2018, meeting at which Trump is alleged to have called Haiti and African nations "shithole countries." Cotton and Senator David Perdue said in a joint statement that "we do not recall the President saying these comments specifically". In a statement, the White House did not deny that Trump had made the comment, although Trump did in a tweet the following day. "The Washington Post" reported that Cotton and Perdue told the White House they heard "shithouse" rather than "shithole". Cotton reiterated on CBS's "Face The Nation", "I certainly didn't hear what Senator Durbin has said repeatedly". "Senator Durbin has a history of misrepresenting what happens in White House meetings, though, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised by that", Cotton added. "Slate" magazine asserted that Cotton was referring to a misquotation Dick Durbin made of a 2013 gathering at the Obama White House at which Durbin was not present, nor had he claimed to be present. Durbin was not the only person at the meeting to confirm Trump's words; another was Lindsey Graham.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In December 2018, Cotton placed a senatorial hold on H.R.7164 - A Bill to add Ireland to the E-3 Non-immigrant Visa Program. The bill did not create new non-immigrant visas, but rather allowed Irish college graduates to apply for any surplus E-3 visas in Specialty Occupations that had gone unused by Australians within their annual cap of 10,500. The bipartisan bill had passed the House of Representatives on November 28, 2018, and had also received the backing of the Trump administration. Because of Cotton's hold, it did not reach the Senate floor for consideration.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton's immigration positions have led to protests at his Washington office. In January 2018, five demonstrators were arrested for obstructing his office while they were protesting his position on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. They were released after paying a $50 fine.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In February 2021, in a speech at CPAC, Cotton criticized the Democrats' and Joe Biden's immigration policies. Cotton claimed, "They have halted deportations for all illegal aliens. Murderers, rapists, terrorists, MS-13 gang members are not being deported." PolitiFact rated Cotton's claim as "False" and elaborated that the "Biden’s administration ordered a 100-day deportation pause, but it did not apply to criminals such as murderers, rapists, terrorists or gang members."


title: Tom Cotton

text: In September 2021, the Senate voted along partisan lines to reject Cotton's amendment that sought to curtail assistance to Afghan refugees after the Taliban took over Afghanistan, and hinder the refugees' ability to obtain federally recognized identification cards without proving their identity.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton opposed the Affordable Care Act, saying in 2012 that "the first step is to repeal that law, which is offensive to a free society and a free people".


title: Tom Cotton

text: In April 2019, Cotton called the Southern Poverty Law Center a "political hate group" and asked the IRS to check whether it should retain its tax-exempt status.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In 2012, Cotton said, "Strong families also depend on strong marriages, and I support the traditional understanding of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. I also support the Defense of Marriage Act." In 2013, Cotton voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, saying that the federal powers in the act were too broad.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In June 2013, Cotton voted in favor of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a bill to ban abortion after 20 or more weeks following fertilization. He has said that "Roe v. Wade" and "Planned Parenthood v. Casey" were "wrongly decided as a constitutional matter" and that the legality of abortion should be up to politicians in the individual states. He was one of 183 co-sponsors of the version of the Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act introduced in 2013. After "Roe v. Wade" was overturned in June 2022, Cotton called "Roe" a "tragic mistake" that had been "corrected" and said he "highly commends the millions of Americans who toiled for years to achieve this great victory for unborn life and self-government.”


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton has said, "I oppose the destruction of human embryos to conduct stem-cell research and all forms of human cloning."


title: Tom Cotton

text: In August 2013, Cotton voted against the Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act of 2013, which sets interest rates on student loans to the 10-year Treasury note plus a varying markup for undergraduate and graduate students. He preferred a solution that ended what he called the "federal-government monopoly on the student-lending business", referring to the provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that changed the way the federal government makes student loans.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Last summer, as insurrection gripped the streets, I called to send in the troops if necessary to restore order. Today, insurrectionists occupied our Capitol. Fortunately, the Capitol Police and other law-enforcement agencies restored order without the need for federal troops. But the principle remains the same: no quarter for insurrectionists. Those who attacked the Capitol today should face the full extent of federal law.


title: Tom Cotton

text: He subsequently repeated his earlier description of those involved as "insurrectionists" and said they should be brought to justice.


title: Tom Cotton

text: On May 28, 2021, Cotton voted against creating an independent commission to investigate the 2021 United States Capitol attack.


title: Tom Cotton

text: After Democrat Mary Peltola won the 2022 Alaska's at-large congressional district special election, defeating former Alaska governor and Republican Sarah Palin, Cotton blasted the ranked-choice voting system that Alaska used to conduct its election, writing: "60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion—which disenfranchises voters—a Democrat won".


title: Tom Cotton

text: During a February 5, 2015, Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Cotton called for housing more prisoners at Guantanamo Bay instead of closing it. He said of the detainees in the camp, "every last one them can rot in hell, but as long as they don't do that they can rot in Guantanamo Bay". The following June, he was one of 21 Senate Republicans to oppose an amendment to the 2016 Defense Authorization Act that would impair any future president's ability to authorize torture. The amendment, which passed, had bipartisan support and was sponsored by John McCain and Dianne Feinstein.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In September 2016, Cotton was one of 34 senators to sign a letter to United States secretary of state John Kerry advocating that the United States use "all available tools to dissuade Russia from continuing its airstrikes in Syria" from an Iranian airbase near Hamadan "that are clearly not in our interest" and stating that there should be clear enforcement by the US of the airstrikes violating "a legally binding Security Council Resolution" on Iran.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In July 2017, Cotton voted in favor of the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act that grouped together sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In July 2017, Cotton co-sponsored the bipartisan Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S.270), which amended existing federal law that criminalized foreign-led boycotts of U.S. allies, by specifically prohibiting support to foreign governments or organizations imposing a boycott on Israel. The proposal generated controversy as some interpreted the law as a restriction on activities by private citizens and potentially a violation of constitutional rights. Others viewed it as a clarification of the existing Export Administration Act of 1979 in response to the 2016 United Nations Human Rights Council resolutions that called on corporations to reassess business activities that may impact Palestinian human rights.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In December 2018, after Trump announced the withdrawal of American troops in Syria, Cotton was one of six senators to sign a letter expressing concern about the move and their belief "that such action at this time is a premature and costly mistake that not only threatens the safety and security of the United States, but also emboldens ISIS, Bashar al Assad, Iran, and Russia." In January 2019, Cotton was one of 11 Republican senators to vote to advance legislation intended to block Trump's intent to lift sanctions against three Russian companies.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In August 2019, it was reported that Cotton had suggested to Trump and the Danish ambassador that the U.S. should buy Greenland. Cotton supports U.S. withdrawal from the Open Skies agreement, which lets nations use special aircraft to monitor each other's military activities. In 2018, he asserted that the agreement was outdated and that it favored Russian interests.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In 2018, Cotton was a cosponsor of the Countering the Chinese Government and Communist Party's Political Influence Operations Act, a bill introduced by Marco Rubio and Catherine Cortez Masto that would grant the U.S. secretary of state and the director of national intelligence (DNI) the authority to create an interagency task force with the purpose of examining attempts by China to influence the U.S. and key allies.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In August 2018, Cotton and 16 other lawmakers urged the Trump administration to impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against Chinese officials who are responsible for human rights violations in western China's Xinjiang region targeting the Uyghur ethnic minority. They wrote in a bipartisan letter, "The detention of as many as a million or more Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in 'political reeducation' centers or camps requires a tough, targeted, and global response".


title: Tom Cotton

text: In February 2019, Cotton was one of the group of Senate Republicans who signed a letter to Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi requesting that Pelosi invite President of Taiwan Tsai Ing-wen to address a joint meeting of Congress. The request came amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and China and was expected to anger Chinese leadership if granted.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In May 2019, when asked about the impact of tariffs on farmers in Arkansas, Cotton said there would be "some sacrifices on the part of Americans, I grant you that, but I also would say that sacrifice is pretty minimal compared to the sacrifices that our soldiers make overseas that are fallen heroes that are laid to rest in Arlington make", and that farmers were willing to make sacrifices in order for the U.S. to fend off against Chinese attempts to displace the U.S. globally.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In May 2019, Cotton was a cosponsor of the South China Sea and East China Sea Sanctions Act, a bipartisan bill reintroduced by Marco Rubio and Ben Cardin that was intended to disrupt China's consolidation or expansion of its claims of jurisdiction over both the sea and air space in disputed zones in the South China Sea.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In July 2019, Cotton and Senator Chris Van Hollen were the primary sponsors of the Defending America's 5G Future Act, a bill that would prevent Huawei from being removed from the "entity list" of the Commerce Department without an act of Congress and authorize Congress to block administration waivers for U.S. companies to do business with Huawei. The bill would also codify Trump's executive order from the previous May that empowered his administration to block foreign tech companies deemed a national security threat from conducting business in the United States.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In April 2020, Cotton said that Chinese students in the United States should be restricted to studying the humanities and banned from studying science-related fields. In an interview with Fox News, he said, "It is a scandal to me that we have trained so many of the Chinese Communist Party's brightest minds."


title: Tom Cotton

text: On January 28, 2020, in the context of the emergence of COVID-19, Cotton urged the Trump administration to halt commercial flights from China to the United States. On January 31, spurred in part by Cotton's warnings, the Trump administration banned most travel from China.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In a February 16, 2020, Fox News interview, Cotton said that the coronavirus may have started at the biosafety level 4 super laboratory in Wuhan, China. "Now, we don't have evidence that this disease originated there", Cotton said, "but because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning we need to at least ask the question". Articles published by "The New York Times" and "The Washington Post" the same day reported that scientists had dismissed claims that the Chinese government created the virus. "The Times" said this was because of its resemblance to the SARS virus, which originated with bats. In another interview on Fox the next day, Cotton said of the two articles, "It tells you the Chinese Communist Party, just like any communist party, has a widespread propaganda effort." "The Post" called Cotton's comments "debunked" and "conspiracy theory" for 15 months until issuing a correction: "The term 'debunked' and "The Post" use of 'conspiracy theory' have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus." Molecular biologist Richard Ebright said "The Post" had omitted his views supporting the lab leak hypothesis and "materially misrepresented" his views, adding, "Watching 'the first rough draft of history' being written as a partisan exercise, rather than a journalistic exercise, was dismaying."


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton tweeted around March 2020: "we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world" for what it had done. To a tweet stating "China will pay for this", he responded "Correct." In late April 2020, Cotton said in a Fox News interview that the non-containment of the pandemic was a "deliberate" and "malevolent" attack by Chinese government on the rest of the world. "They did not want to see their relative power and standing in the world decline because the virus was contained [in China]", he said.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In 2013, Cotton introduced legislative language to prohibit trade with relatives of individuals subject to U.S. sanctions against Iran. According to Cotton, this would include "a spouse and any relative to the third degree", such as "parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids." After Cotton's amendment came under harsh criticism regarding its constitutionality, he withdrew it.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In March 2015, Cotton wrote and sent , signed by 47 of the Senate's 54 Republicans, that cast doubt on the Obama administration's authority to engage in nuclear-proliferation negotiations with Iran. The next president, they asserted, could reject it "with the stroke of a pen". The open letter was released in English as well as a poorly translated Persian version, which "read like a middle schooler wrote it", according to "Foreign Policy". Within hours, commentators suggested that the letter prepared by Cotton constituted a violation of the Logan Act. Questions were also raised about whether it reflected a flawed interpretation of the Treaty Clause of the United States Constitution.


title: Tom Cotton

text: President Obama mocked the letter, calling it an "unusual coalition" with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as well as an interference with the ongoing negotiations of a comprehensive agreement on the Iranian nuclear program. In addition, Obama said, "I'm embarrassed for them. For them to address a letter to the Ayatollah—the Supreme Leader of Iran, who they claim is our mortal enemy—and their basic argument to them is: don't deal with our president, 'cause you can't trust him to follow through on an agreement ... That's close to unprecedented."


title: Tom Cotton

text: Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, responded to the letter by saying "[the senators'] letter in fact undermines the credibility of thousands of such mere executive agreements that have been or will be entered into by the US with various other governments". Zarif pointed out that the nuclear deal is not supposed to be an Iran–US deal, but an international one, saying, "change of administration does not in any way relieve the next administration from international obligations undertaken by its predecessor in a possible agreement about Iran's peaceful nuclear program." He continued, "I wish to enlighten the authors that if the next administration revokes any agreement with the stroke of a pen, as they boast, it will have simply committed a blatant violation of international law."


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton defended the letter amid criticism that it undermined Obama's efforts, saying, "It's so important we communicated this message straight to Iran... No regrets at all... they already control Tehran, increasingly they control Damascus and Beirut and Baghdad and now Sana'a as well." He continued to defend his action in an interview with MSNBC by saying, "There are nothing but hardliners in Iran. They've been killing Americans for 35 years. They kill hundreds of troops in Iraq. Now they control five capitals in the Middle East. There are nothing but hardliners in Tehran and if they do all those things without a nuclear weapon, imagine what they'll do with a nuclear weapon."


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton received extensive financial support from pro-Israel groups due to his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and for his hawkish stance toward Iran. Several pro-Israel Republican billionaires who contributed millions of dollars to William Kristol's Emergency Committee for Israel spent $960,000 to support Cotton.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In July 2018, Cotton introduced the Iran Hostage Taking Accountability Act, a bill that would call for the president to compose a list of Iranians that were "knowingly responsible for or complicit in...the politically-motivated harassment, abuse, extortion, arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing, or imprisonment" of Americans and have those on the list face sanctions along with enabling the president to impose sanctions on their family members and bar them from entering the United States. Cotton stated that Iran had not changed much since 1981 and called for Americans to avoid Iran and its borders as there were "many friendly countries in the region that you can visit where you'd be safer".


title: Tom Cotton

text: In May 2019, Cotton said that in the event of a war with Iran, the United States could easily win in "two strikes. The first strike and the last strike". He said there would be a "furious response" by the United States if there was any provocation from Iran.


title: Tom Cotton

text: On March 13, 2018, in an interview on conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt's radio show, Cotton said he expected Russian officials to "lie and deny" about the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, an ex-Russian spy on British soil. After Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Theresa May gave Russia 24 hours to respond to the poison, Cotton said, "I suspect the response will be the typical Russian response. They’ll lie and deny." He went on to suggest retaliatory measures that the U.K. and the U.S. could implement in response to Russia's alleged actions, including renewed sanctions on oil.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Former chief presidential strategist Steve Bannon has said of Cotton, "Next to Trump, he’s the elected official who gets it the most—the economic nationalism. Cotton was the one most supportive of us, up front and behind the scenes, from the beginning. He understands that the Washington élite—this permanent political class of both parties, between the K Street consultants and politicians—needs to be shattered".


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton has been called one of the leading voices of Trumpism. "The Washington Post" wrote: "What's fascinating is how Cotton has adjusted since Trump's victory. Some have argued that Cotton could be the "heir" to the Trumpism wing of the Republican Party.


title: Tom Cotton

text: Cotton has said that Walter Russell Mead, Robert D. Kaplan, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Silva, C. J. Box, and Jason Matthews are among his favorite authors.


title: Tom Cotton

text: In 2019, Cotton published a book about the role of the Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery, partly based on his service in that unit as an officer.


title: Portal 2

text: Portal 2 is a 2011 puzzle-platform video game developed by Valve for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The digital PC version is distributed online by Valve's Steam service, while all retail editions were distributed by Electronic Arts. A port for the Nintendo Switch was included as part of "Portal: Companion Collection".


title: Portal 2

text: Like the original "Portal" (2007), players solve puzzles by placing portals and teleporting between them. "Portal 2" adds features including tractor beams, lasers, light bridges, and paint-like gels that alter player movement or allow portals to be placed on any surface. In the single-player campaign, players control Chell, who navigates the dilapidated Aperture Science Enrichment Center during its reconstruction by the supercomputer GLaDOS (Ellen McLain); new characters include robot Wheatley (Stephen Merchant) and Aperture founder Cave Johnson (J. K. Simmons). In the new cooperative mode, players solve puzzles together as robots Atlas and P-Body (both voiced by Dee Bradley Baker). Jonathan Coulton and the National produced songs for the game.


title: Portal 2

text: Valve announced "Portal 2" in March 2010, and promoted it with alternate reality games including the Potato Sack, a collaboration with several independent game developers. After release, Valve released downloadable content and a simplified map editor to allow players to create and share levels.


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal 2" received critical acclaim for its gameplay, balanced learning curve, pacing, dark humor, writing, and acting. Like its predecessor, it has been described as one of the greatest video games ever made by numerous publications and critics.


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal 2" is a first-person perspective puzzle game. The player takes the role of Chell in the single-player campaign, as one of two robotsAtlas and P-Bodyin the cooperative campaign, or as a simplistic humanoid icon in community-developed puzzles. Characters can withstand limited damage but will die after sustained injury. The goal of both campaigns is to explore the Aperture Science Laboratory—a complicated, malleable mechanized maze. While some parts of the game takes place in modular test chambers with clearly defined entrances and exits, other parts occur in behind-the-scenes areas where the objective is less clear.


title: Portal 2

text: The initial tutorials guide the player through movement controls and interactions with their environment, and in the case of the cooperative campaign, interactions with the other player. Gameplay revolves around the use of the "Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device", which can create a pair of two portals on suitable surfaces through which the player or objects can pass through. Characters can use these portals to move between rooms or to "fling" objects or themselves across a distance.


title: Portal 2

text: Additional game elements not featured in the original "Portal" include Thermal Discouragement Beams (lasers), Excursion Funnels (tractor beams), and Hard Light Bridges, all of which can be transmitted through portals. Aerial Faith Plates catapult the player and objects through the air. The player must disable sentient, lethal turrets or avoid their line of sight. The Weighted Storage Cube has been redesigned, and there are new types: Redirection Cubes, which have prismatic lenses that redirect laser beams, spherical Edgeless Safety Cubes, an antique version of the Weighted Storage Cube used in the underground levels, and a cube-turret hybrid created by Wheatley after taking control of Aperture. The heart-decorated Weighted Companion Cube reappears briefly. Early demonstrations included Pneumatic Diversity Vents, shown to transport objects and transfer suction power through portals, but these do not appear in the final game. The typical objective of a test chamber or level is to use the portal gun and provided gameplay elements to open a locked exit door and progress to the next chamber.


title: Portal 2

text: Paint-like gels (which are dispensed from pipes and can be transported through portals) impart certain properties to surfaces or objects coated with them. Players can use orange Propulsion Gel to cross surfaces more quickly, blue Repulsion Gel to bounce from a surface, and white Conversion Gel to allow surfaces to accept portals. Only one type of gel can affect a certain surface at a time. Some surfaces, such as grilles, cannot be coated with a gel. Water can block or wash away gels, returning the surface or object to its normal state.


title: Portal 2

text: In the cooperative campaign, two players can use the same console with a split screen, or can use a separate computer or console; Windows, Mac OS X, and PlayStation 3 users can play with each other regardless of platform. Both player-characters are robots equipped with independent portal guns, a portal pair placed by either player is usable by both. Most chambers are lack strict structure, and require players to use both sets of portals for laser or funnel redirection, launches, and other maneuvers. The game provides voice communication between players, and online players can temporarily enter a split-screen view to help coordinate actions. Players can "ping" to draw the other player's attention to walls or objects, start countdown timers for synchronized actions, and perform joint gestures such as waving or hugging. The game tracks which chambers each player has completed and allows players to replay chambers they have completed with new partners.


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal 2"s lead writer Erik Wolpaw estimates each campaign to be about six hours long. "Portal 2" contains in-game commentary from the game developers, writers, and artists. The commentary, which is unlocked per completed chapter, appears on node icons scattered through the chambers. According to Valve, each of the single-player and cooperative campaigns is 2 to 2.5 times as long as the campaign in "Portal", with the overall game five times as long.


title: Portal 2

text: The "Portal" series shares a fictional universe with the "Half-Life" series. The events in "Portal" take place between the first and second "Half-Life" games, while most of "Portal 2" is set "a long time after" the events in "Portal" and "Half-Life 2".


title: Portal 2

text: Before "Portal", Aperture Science conducted experiments to determine whether human subjects could safely navigate dangerous "test chambers", until the artificial intelligence GLaDOS, governing the laboratory, killed its employees. At the end of the first "Portal", the protagonist Chell destroys GLaDOS and momentarily escapes the facility, but is dragged back inside by an unseen figure later identified by writer Erik Wolpaw as the "Party Escort Bot". A shows estranged Aperture Science employee Doug Rattmann, who used graffiti to guide the player in "Portal", placing Chell into suspended animation to save her life, until the beginning of "Portal 2".


title: Portal 2

text: In the Aperture Science facility, player-character Chell wakes in a stasis chamber resembling a motel room. The complex has become dilapidated after what appears to be millennia of decay. Wheatley (Stephen Merchant), a personality core, guides her through old test chambers from the first game in an attempt to escape. They accidentally reactivate the dormant GLaDOS (Ellen McLain), who separates Chell from Wheatley and begins rebuilding the laboratory.


title: Portal 2

text: GLaDOS subjects Chell to new tests until Wheatley helps her escape again. They sabotage Aperture's manufacturing plants, then confront GLaDOS and perform a core transfer; replacing her with Wheatley as the laboratory's controller. Wheatley, driven mad with power, installs GLaDOS on a potato battery. GLaDOS tells Chell that Wheatley was designed as an "intelligence dampening sphere" to deliberately produce illogical thoughts and hamper her own intelligence. Infuriated, Wheatley accidentally drops Chell and GLaDOS through an elevator shaft to the laboratories' abandoned lowest levels.


title: Portal 2

text: Chell retrieves the potato battery and they form a reluctant partnership to stop Wheatley before his incompetence destroys the facility. Ascending through laboratories built in the 20th century, they discover audio recordings by Aperture Science founder Cave Johnson (J. K. Simmons). The recordings reveal how Aperture slowly lost money and prestige, and that Johnson became mortally ill from moon dust used to manufacture portal-conductive surfaces. His last request was for the mind of his assistant Caroline (McLain) to be transferred—by force, if necessary—to an advanced computer designed to store a human consciousness, which he had previously commissioned to save himself, creating GLaDOS. GLaDOS is troubled by the discovery that she is Caroline.


title: Portal 2

text: Chell and GLaDOS return to Aperture's higher levels, where they discover Wheatley's utter incompetence has brought the Aperture facility on the verge of catastrophic failure. In the game's boss fight and ending, Chell confronts Wheatley and attaches corrupted personality cores (Nolan North) to force another core exchange and restore GLaDOS to authority. However, Wheatley demolishes the button necessary to initiate the transfer. As the facility crumbles, Chell places a portal on the Moon; she and Wheatley begin to be pulled into the vacuum of space. GLaDOS, having reasserted control over the facility, rescues Chell and abandons Wheatley to outer space. When Chell awakens, GLaDOS claims to have learned of humanity from the remnants of Caroline, but deletes Caroline's personality. Deciding that Chell is not worth the trouble of killing, GLaDOS frees her from the facility.


title: Portal 2

text: In a post-credits scene, Wheatley, still trapped in space along with another core, voices his regrets about betraying Chell.


title: Portal 2

text: The cooperative story is chronologically set after the events of the single player campaign, but players are not required to play them in order. Player characters ATLAS and P-Body are bipedal robots constructed by GLaDOS. In the first four 'sets' of levels, the robots are sent on ventures into the depths of the Aperture facilities to recover and upload data disks. After completion of each mission, the robots self-destruct and are reassembled to complete the next.


title: Portal 2

text: At first, GLaDOS is excited about her non-human test subjects, but later becomes dissatisfied because the two robots cannot truly die, and at one point also gets uncomfortable with their close partnership. At the end of the story, the robots gain entry to "the Vault", a storage facility of thousands of humans placed in stasis. GLaDOS thanks the robots for their acquisition of new test subjects, and promptly destroys the robots.


title: Portal 2

text: The robots are reactivated by GLaDOS one week after the original co-op campaign, during which GLaDOS has already wiped out all of the found test subjects after attempting to turn them into "killing machines". The robots are sent to find a saboteur that has taken control of a prototype central core and is causing problems in the facility. The saboteur is revealed to be a bird pecking at the console's keyboard, which sends GLaDOS into a panic when she recognizes it as the one who tried to eat her during her time as a potato battery. The robots manage to shoo away the bird, earning a rare compliment from GLaDOS before she notices eggs in its nest. Instead of having them smashed, GLaDOS has the eggs taken to her chamber so that she can raise the baby birds to be her killing machines.


title: Portal 2

text: After the success of "Portal", Valve decided to make "Portal 2" a standalone product, partly because of pressure from other developers within Valve who wanted to work on a "Portal" product. Work began almost immediately after the release of "Portal". Valve committed more resources to "Portal 2"s development than they had for the first game; "Portal" had a team of seven or eight people, but "Portal 2" had a team of 30 or 40. The initial team of four was expanded as subgroups formed to devise game mechanics and to plot the story. Participants in internal review processes were inspired by what they saw to join the project. According to Erik Wolpaw, some "Portal 2" developers worked on the "Left 4 Dead" games to help them meet milestones, but returned to "Portal 2", "with extra people in tow." Kim Swift, "Portal"s designer, left Valve for Airtight Games halfway through "Portal 2"s development.


title: Portal 2

text: Project manager Erik Johnson said Valve's goal for "Portal 2" was to find a way to "re-surprise" players, which he considered a "pretty terrifying" prospect. In March 2011, one month before the game's release, Valve president Gabe Newell called "Portal 2" "the best game we've ever done". After "Portal 2"s release, Geoff Keighley wrote that according to Newell, ""Portal 2" will probably be Valve's last game with an isolated single-player experience". Keighley later stated that the use of the word "probably" suggests that "this could change." Newell said that Valve is not "giving up on single-player", but intends to include more social features on top of the single player experience, akin to the cooperative mode in "Portal 2".


title: Portal 2

text: Initially, Valve planned to exclude portals from "Portal 2." For five months, they focused on a gameplay mechanic called "F-Stop"; Valve did not discuss the specifics of the idea as they may use it in a future game. In 2020, developer LunchHouse Software revealed they were using Valve's F-Stop code in their upcoming game "Exposure." The mechanic was based on an "Aperture Camera", with which users could take photos of objects, store the object in a camera, and then replace it while rotating or scaling it. Valve's F-Stop game was set in the 1980s, and would not have featured Chell or GLaDOS; instead, it followed a new test subject involved in a conflict within Aperture after Johnson, in an attempt to reach immortality, uploaded himself into an artificial intelligence and took control of a robot army. Though the playtesters liked F-Stop, they expressed disappointment at the omission of portals. Based on the playtesting feedback, Newell directed the team to reconsider direction around October 2008.


title: Portal 2

text: Valve did not aim to make "Portal 2" more difficult than "Portal", but instead to produce "a game where you think your way through particular parts of the level, and feel really smart when you solve it". To allow players to learn the game rules incrementally, Valve designed two basic types of test chamber: one, which Valve called "checklisting", provides a safe environment for the player to experiment with a new concept, while the other combines elements in new ways to force the player to think laterally.


title: Portal 2

text: Test chambers began as isometric drawings on whiteboard. The developers ran a sanity check before crafting simple levels with the Hammer Editor, Valve's level construction tool. Iterative playtesting ensured the solutions were neither too obvious nor too difficult; playtesters sometimes discovered alternative solutions, which the team removed if they were considered too easy.


title: Portal 2

text: Valve aimed to teach new players the portal mechanics while still entertaining experienced players. To this end, they streamlined some elements; for example, the moving energy balls of "Portal" were replaced with lasers, which provide immediate feedback. To evoke a sense of nostalgia and time having passed between the games, Valve included test chambers from the original "Portal;" they used higher-resolution textures supported by the improved game engine, and applied decay, collapse and overgrowth effects.


title: Portal 2

text: The middle section of the single-player campaign takes place in large spaces where few portals can be placed, forcing players to find creative ways to cross. The architecture in these sections was inspired by photographs of industrial complexes such as CERN, NASA, and the abandoned Soviet space program. When Wheatley controls the Aperture facility, the designers "had a blast" creating deranged chambers reflecting Wheatley's stupidity. As solving constant puzzles would tire players, the designers inserted occasional "experiences" to provide respite and advance the plot.


title: Portal 2

text: The Repulsion (jumping) and Propulsion (running) gels in "Portal 2" originated in "". Valve hired the "Tag" creators to develop the idea further and later decided to include it in "Portal 2". Journalists have likened "Tag" to "Narbacular Drop", the DigiPen student project whose mechanics became "Portal". As the third "Tag" gel, which allows the character to walk on any surface regardless of gravity, gave playtesters motion sickness, it was replaced by Conversion gel, which integrates with the portal mechanic. The gels give the player more control over the environment, which increased the challenge for the puzzle designers. The gels are rendered using fluid dynamics routines specially developed at Valve by the former Tag Team. Rendering techniques developed for "Left 4 Dead 2" were used to render pools of liquid; "Portal 2" combines "flowing" surface maps to mimic the motion of water with "debris flow" maps and random noise to create realistic, real-time rendering of water effects.


title: Portal 2

text: The cooperative mode originated from players' requests and from anecdotes of players working together on the same computer or console to solve the game's puzzles. Wolpaw likened this to players working together on the same computer to solve point-and-click adventure games. The cooperative campaign was also inspired by Valve's "Left 4 Dead" cooperative games, in which players enjoyed discussing their personal experiences with the game when they had finished playing it.


title: Portal 2

text: While the single player campaign in "Portal 2" is designed to avoid frustrating the player, the cooperative levels focus on coordination and communication, and Valve recognizes they are much more difficult than the single-player puzzles. Valve did not include timed puzzles in the single-player campaigns in "Portal" and "Portal 2", but found that their inclusion in the cooperative mode is effective and gives players a positive feeling after they successfully plan and execute difficult maneuvers.


title: Portal 2

text: Each puzzle chamber in the cooperative mode requires actions from both players. As soon as a playtester discovered a way to complete a puzzle with one set of portals, the level was sent back to the designers for further work. With few exceptions, Valve designed the chambers so that both players would remain in sight of each other to promote communication and cooperation. Some of the puzzle chambers were designed asymmetrically; one player would manipulate portals and controls to allow the other player to cross the room, emphasizing that the two characters, while working together, are separate entities. The designers soon realized that the ability to tag surfaces with instructional icons for one's partner was a necessary element, since they found this to be more effective for cooperation than simple, verbal instructions.


title: Portal 2

text: Valve considered a competitive mode. According to Wolpaw, the mode was similar to the video game "Speedball"; one team would try to transport a ball from one side of the playing field to the other using portals, while the other team would attempt to stop them with their own use of portals. Matches would commence with this objective in mind, but quickly descended into chaos. Valve realized that people enjoyed solving puzzles with portals more and therefore they focused on the cooperative mode.


title: Portal 2

text: Wolpaw and ex-"National Lampoon" writer Jay Pinkerton wrote the single-player story, while "Left 4 Dead" writer Chet Faliszek wrote GLaDOS's lines for the cooperative campaign. The game has 13,000 lines of dialogue. The writers felt they needed to create a larger story for a stand-alone title, and wanted the game to "feel relatively intimate", and avoided adding too many new characters. They considered expanding the "sterility and dryness" of "Portal" and adding more comedy to the script. Wolpaw said that while some developers have been moving towards art games, no one had made a comedic video game. The game's story development was tightly coordinated with the gameplay development and testing.


title: Portal 2

text: The developers initially envisioned a prequel set in the 1950s, long before GLaDOS took over the Aperture Science facility, with events set in motion when Aperture CEO Cave Johnson is put into a computer, only to realize it was a mistake. Johnson would have led an army of robots, which would battle against the player to rise to power within Aperture. In June 2008, based on information from a casting call website and leaked script samples, "Kotaku" reported that Valve was seeking voice actors to play Johnson, named him as an AI and identified the game as a prequel. Valve attributed this leak to an "overeager agent". Following negative playtester feedback about the omission of Chell and GLaDOS, "Portal 2" was re-conceived as a sequel. The team returned to the idea of exploring parts of the facility from Aperture's early days, and reincorporated Johnson through a series of recordings.


title: Portal 2

text: The writers originally conceived several premature joke game endings if the player performed certain actions, but these required too much development effort for little payback and were scrapped. One of these joke endings was triggered by shooting a portal onto the moon's surface, after which the player's character would die from asphyxiation over a closing song, but the idea of creating a portal on the moon was incorporated into the game's final ending. The writers planned that Chell would say a single word during the ending, but this was not considered funny enough. In an early version of the script, Chell finds a lost "tribe" of turrets looking for their leader, a huge "Animal King" turret which can be seen in in-game videos of the retail product. As a reward, the Animal King would have married Chell to a turret, which would have followed Chell around the game without visible movement. The cooperative campaign was planned to feature a more detailed storyline, in which GLaDOS would send two robots to discover human artifacts, such as a comic based on a pastiche of "Garfield". The writers hoped to use this idea to make the robots human-like for testing purposes, but recognized that unlike the captive audience of the single-player campaign, the two players in cooperative mode may simply talk over the story, and thus the story was condensed into very basic elements.


title: Portal 2

text: Wolpaw said that while many story elements of "Portal" are revisited in "Portal 2", he avoided some of the memes—such as the frequently repeated "the cake is a lie". He said, "if you thought you were sick of the memes, I was sick of it way ahead of you". Wolpaw "couldn't resist putting in just one" cake joke. The writers did not try to predict or write new memes, and Wolpaw said, "you can't really plan for [dialogue to become a meme] because if you do it probably seems weird and forced". "Portal 2" produced its own memes, including a space-obsessed personality core. Valve later created a Space Core modification for the game "" (see below), and the Space Core also appeared as a laser-based engraving on a panel manufactured by NASA for the International Space Station.


title: Portal 2

text: The writers saw Aperture Science itself as a character. It is depicted as a "living, breathing place", and "a science company that's gone mad with science." In the "Lab Rat" comic, the facility is described as a "beautiful and terrible" place, "a metastasized amalgam of add-ons, additions and appropriations. Building itself out of itself."


title: Portal 2

text: Richard McCormick of "PlayStation 3 Magazine" identified several elements of "Portal 2"s story that reference the myth of Prometheus; McCormick wrote that GLaDOS is a personification of Prometheus, who grants knowledge to humanity—in the form of the portal gun—and is then punished by being bound to a rock, pecked at by birds, and is cast into the pits of Tartarus. McCormick also likens Wheatley to Prometheus' foolish brother Epimetheus. Within the game, a turret makes reference to the Prometheus myth, the word "Tartarus" is visible on the supporting columns in the depths of Aperture Science, and a portrait of Cave and Caroline also shows Aeschylus, the presumed author of "Prometheus Bound". Journalists and players have also found connections between "Portal 2" and "Half-Life 2". As an easter egg, a hidden area in "Portal 2" contains the empty dry dock of Aperture Science's cargo ship, the "Borealis", which is found during "" to have been stranded in the Arctic as a result of a teleportation experiment.


title: Portal 2

text: Though "Portal 2" introduced some new characters, the writers wanted to maintain the one-on-one relationships between each character and the player-character. Valve explored the possibility of introducing a new protagonist for "Portal 2". The playtesters accepted playing as a different character for the first part of the game, but they became disoriented when GLaDOS did not recognize them. The writers returned to using Chell, the protagonist of "Portal". Valve artists experimented with Chell's attire, and considered changing her (ambiguous) nationality. They returned to the orange "dehumanizing" jumpsuit from "Portal" with the top tied around Chell's waist to enhance her freedom of movement and help her "stand out more as an individual". "PSM3" called the new look "controversially sexy". As in the first game, Chell's facial appearance is based on that of voice actress Alésia Glidewell. Chell continues her role as a silent observer, as the straight man in response to the insanity around her and refuses to give her antagonists any satisfaction.


title: Portal 2

text: As part of her character arc, the plot moves GLaDOS from her anger with Chell for her actions in "Portal", which Wolpaw said "was going to get old pretty quick", to an internal struggle. The reuse of McLain's voice led to the creation of a backstory and subplot about GLaDOS's creation. The writers panicked when they realized that their plans to have Chell and GLaDOS play off each other would only work if both players spoke. To remedy this, they created the Caroline subplot to give GLaDOS an external situation to deal with and to drive the story during the middle act of the game.


title: Portal 2

text: The writers considered introducing about six personality cores stored in portable spheres, whose main function would be story advancement. They planned cores based on Morgan Freeman's character Red from "The Shawshank Redemption" and Quint from "Jaws", among others. Ultimately they decided to concentrate on a single core, Wheatley, recycling three of the rejected cores in the final boss fight. Karen Prell, a veteran performer for the Muppets, led the animation team for Wheatley and the other personality cores.


title: Portal 2

text: Pictures of Cave Johnson, based on the face of lead animator Bill Fletcher, appear throughout "Portal 2". Though comparisons have been made between Johnson and Andrew Ryan, the wealthy industrialist who created the fictional underwater city of Rapture in "BioShock", Wolpaw says the writers did not consider this character while creating Johnson. The two robotic characters provide some amusing death scenes in the cooperative mode, such as struggling while being crushed by a lowering ceiling. The artists thought the look of the robots would help tell the story, and the fact that they are holding hands emphasizes the cooperative mode. "Expressive noises" and mannerisms are used in place of distinguishable dialogue, and the robotic characters were designed as a double-act, similar to Laurel and Hardy.


title: Portal 2

text: GLaDOS returns from "Portal" as a major character and the game's antagonist, and is voiced by Ellen McLain. The writers found that they needed another character to play off Johnson, but did not want to hire another voice actor. Having already recruited McLain to play GLaDOS, they asked her to provide the voice for Caroline, Cave Johnson's assistant. Wheatley is voiced by Stephen Merchant; early demonstrations at trade shows used the voice of Valve animator Richard Lord. The writers wrote Wheatley's lines with Merchant in mind, citing his unique "vocal silhouette" and his ability to ad lib in a "frantic" manner. They had assumed that Merchant would be unavailable and contacted "The IT Crowd"s writer Graham Linehan to try to get Richard Ayoade, but then discovered that Merchant was interested. Merchant spent around sixteen hours recording lines and was given freedom to improvise.


title: Portal 2

text: J. K. Simmons voices Cave Johnson, Aperture Science's founder and CEO. Simmons's selection helped to solidify the character's development. The robots' voices were provided by Dee Bradley Baker, who had performed similar robotic voices for the "" media.


title: Portal 2

text: In the cooperative campaign, a separate story involves two robotic characters and GLaDOS. The designers initially planned to use Chell and a new human character called "Mel". GLaDOS' dialogue would play off the humans' "image issues", and this aspect was retained after the designers switched to using robots. GLaDOS seems troubled by the robots' cooperation, and tries to aggravate their relationship through psychological tactics, such as praising one robot over the other. Valve initially considered having GLaDOS deliver separate lines to each player, but they found this to be a significant effort for minimal benefit. The writers also tried adding lines for GLaDOS that would encourage the players to compete against each other for rewards, such as meaningless points, but playtesters did not respond well. Faliszek said that in cooperative games, it can be difficult to deliver key dialogue or in-game events to players, who may not be looking in the right direction at the right time. Instead, using their experience from previous games, Faliszek and Wolpaw kept the story and key comedic lines short, and repeated them frequently.


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal 2" contains both scored and procedurally generated music created by Valve's composer, Mike Morasky, and two songs; "Want You Gone" recorded by Jonathan Coulton, used on the final credits of the single-player mode, and "Exile Vilify" by the National, used in the background of one of the Rat Man's dens. The full soundtrack "Songs to Test By", containing most of the songs in the game, was released as three free downloads between May and September 2011, and later in October 2012 as a retail Collector's Edition, including the soundtrack from "Portal".


title: Portal 2

text: In January 2008, Valve spokesman Doug Lombardi told Eurogamer, "There'll be more Portal, for sure", and "Portal" designer Kim Swift confirmed that work on "Portal 2" would begin the following month. Swift said that a multiplayer mode in "Portal" was "technically possible", but that it was "less fun than you'd think."


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal 2" was officially announced on March 5, 2010, via "Game Informer". Events during the preceding week foreshadowed the announcement. On March 1, Valve released a patch for "Portal" that included a new achievement, "Transmission Received", requiring the player to manipulate in-game radios. This revealed new sound effects that became part of an alternate reality game (ARG). Some of the new effects were of Morse code strings that suggested GLaDOS was rebooting, while others could be decoded as SSTV images from grainy Aperture Science videos. The images included hints to a BBS phone number that, when accessed, provided a large number of ASCII-based images relating to "Portal" and segments of Aperture Science documents. Many of these ASCII pictures were later published in the "Game Informer" reveal of the title. New ASCII images continued to appear on the BBS after the official announcement. Background on the ARG is embedded in additional SSTV images found in a hidden room in "Portal 2". Valve's Adam Foster came up with the idea for the ARG, tying it to the "Game Informer" reveal, and he provided his own home phone line to run the BBS software on, as Valve's offices at the time were too modern to support the protocol. Foster estimates the ARG cost less than $100 to run.


title: Portal 2

text: A second "Portal" patch released on March 3 altered the game's ending sequence to show Chell being pulled back into the Aperture facility. Gaming journalists speculated that an announcement of "Portal 2" was imminent. On March 5, "Game Informer" announced "Portal 2"s official release on the cover of its April issue. During the following week, Gabe Newell's speech accepting the Pioneer Award at the Game Developers Conference 2010 ended with a fake blue screen of death appearing on a screen behind him with a message purported to be from GLaDOS which hinted of further "Portal 2" news at the upcoming E3 2010. Two weeks before the E3, game journalists received a cryptic e-mail, worded as a press release from Aperture Science, hinting that the presentation on "Portal 2" would be replaced with "a surprise" jointly hosted by Aperture Science and Valve. This prompted speculation that the surprise would be the announcement of "", but Valve confirmed that it would be about "Portal 2". The surprise was the announcement of "Portal 2" on PlayStation 3.


title: Portal 2

text: The March 2010 announcement said that "Portal 2" would be released in late 2010. In August 2010, Valve postponed the release to February 2011, with a Steam release date of February 9, to allow it to complete changes to the game's dialogue, to fill and connect about sixty test chambers, and to finish refinements to the gel gameplay mechanic. Valve announced a further delay in November 2010 and gave a release dates through retail channels in the week of April 18, 2011: April 20 in North America and April 22 in Europe and Australia. Wolpaw stated that this eight-week delay was used to expand the game's content before reaching an internal milestone called a "content lock", after which no further content could be added. The remaining development work involved debugging. Newell allowed the delay considering the added benefits of the new content, because he thought the company would not lose any commercial opportunities because of it. On February 18, 2011, Newell confirmed that Valve had completed the development work on "Portal 2" and that they were "waiting for final approvals and to get the discs manufactured". "Portal 2" was the first Valve product simultaneously released for Windows and Mac OS X computers through the Steam platform. Retail copies for all platforms were distributed by Electronic Arts.


title: Portal 2

text: On April 1, 2011, Valve released another alternate reality game called the Potato Sack. Players tried to solve the multi-tiered puzzle, coordinating efforts through web sites and chat rooms. Some journalists believed the game denoted the release of "Portal 2" on April 15, 2011, instead of the target release date of April 19, 2011. On April 15, the players discovered "GLaDOS@Home", a distributed computing spoof that encouraged participants to play the games to unlock "Portal 2" early. Once the puzzles were solved, "Portal 2" was unlocked on April 18 at around 21:30 PST, roughly ten hours before its planned release at 7:00 PST on the next day.


title: Portal 2

text: Valve created a series of television commercials to promote "Portal 2". Valve had worked with advertising agencies in the past, but Lombardi found the advertisements created had shown little ingenuity. Valve's Doug Lombardi had been disappointed by "Copycat treatments. Cliché treatments. Treatments that reveal the agency wasn't listening in the initial meeting." Using viewer feedback, Valve tailored the ad content until they were satisfied with the results. The ads took eight weeks to complete. Valve also developed online promotional videos featuring J. K. Simmons narrating as Cave Johnson, to promote new elements of "Portal 2"s gameplay. These videos were part of a larger effort described by Newell as a "documentary-style investment opportunity" for "Portal 2". An earlier video released on February 14, 2011, promoted the cooperative aspect of "Portal 2" as a St. Valentine's gift and "lit up our preorders, our buzz, all the metrics that are used and collected by publishers and retailers". Lombardi said the videos "dwarfed the demos and interviews we did". Valve also offered "Portal 2"-themed merchandise, such as posters, drinking glasses, and T-shirts.


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal 2" includes bonus content, including four promotional videos, a "Lab Rat" comic, and an interactive trailer for the 2011 film "Super 8", constructed with the Source game engine. A feature called "Robot Enrichment" allows players to customize the cooperative campaign characters with new gestures and cosmetic items such as hats or flags. These can be earned in-game, traded with other players, or bought through microtransactions at the in-game store.


title: Portal 2

text: Valve planned to produce downloadable content for "Portal 2", beginning with "Peer Review", released on October 4, 2011. The content, which is free regardless of platform, includes a new cooperative campaign which extends the game's story. A week from the end of the cooperative campaign, GLaDOS prepares Atlas and P-Body to deal with an intruder within Aperture Science—the bird that had previously abducted her as a potato. The content also adds a "challenge mode" similar to that in "Portal"—players try to complete specific chambers with the shortest time or fewest portals used, both which are tracked on overall and friends leaderboards. The challenge modes are available for both single-player and cooperative modes.


title: Portal 2

text: According to Faliszek, user-generated content for "Portal 2" would be available on all platforms, but because of software dependencies, the necessary modding tools would only be available for Windows. Valve released beta versions of the modding tools on May 10, 2011, and supported a competition held by the community mapping website "Thinking with Portals" in May 2011, providing prizes for the most-selected maps. The "Perpetual Testing Initiative", a free title update for the Windows and Mac versions, was released on May 8, 2012, and includes a new level editor and a means of obtaining and sharing user-created levels through the Steam Workshop. In November 2011, GTTV host Geoff Keighley said that Valve was developing a simplified level editing tool to allow novice editors to assemble test chambers without learning how to use the modified Valve Hammer Editor, and an in-game system to distribute user-created levels via the Steam Workshop. This mapping system entered beta testing in March 2012. Within a few days of release, the Perpetual Testing Initiative add-on had been used to create 35,000 maps, with 1.3 million downloads of these maps through Steam. Within a month, more than 150,000 user-created maps were available. The first release of the Perpetual Testing Initiative was limited to single-player maps, but a patch released in August 2012 enabled users to create new levels for cooperative play.


title: Portal 2

text: , Valve supports fan reuse of "Portal 2" content, offering selected assets and assistance. The Windows release of "Bastion" includes a weapon inspired by "Portal 2"s Conversion Gel and turrets; its developer Supergiant Games received writing assistance from Erik Wolpaw and McLain voiced new lines for the turrets. An add-on scenario for Hidden Path Entertainment's tower defense game "" incorporates GLaDOS as an antagonist using new dialogue from McLain and assets from "Portal 2". Wolpaw and McLain also helped to create additional lines for GLaDOS for a custom single-player map commissioned by Gary Hudston, which he used to propose marriage to his fiancée, Stephanie. For a patch for Bethesda's "" that incorporated support for Steam Workshop content, Valve developed a free add-on module that introduced the Space Core as a non-player character that follows the player around. Valve collaborated with Zen Studios to create a "Portal 2"-themed pinball table, among other Valve-themed tables, for their games "Pinball FX 2" and "Zen Pinball". A "Portal 2"-themed set is available for "Lego Dimensions" by Warner Bros. Entertainment and Traveller's Tales; the game features additional stories written by Traveller's Tales with Valve's blessing set after the events of Portal 2, with Ellen McLain, Stephen Merchant and J.K. Simmons reprising their respective voice roles, as well as a new GLaDOS credits song written by Jonathan Coulton and performed by McLain.


title: Portal 2

text: The Xbox 360 version was added to the backwards compatibility feature for the Xbox One in June 2016. Alongside "Portal", "Portal 2" was released on the Nintendo Switch on June 28, 2022 as part of "Portal: Companion Collection", developed by Valve and Nvidia Lightspeed Studios.


title: Portal 2

text: Valve announced "Teach with Portals" and "Steam for Schools" in June 2012, initiatives that offered "Portal 2" and "Portal 2 Puzzle Maker" for education. The educational version was free but only contained the single-player campaign and "Puzzle Maker", and was only available for "Steam for Schools" users.


title: Portal 2

text: Several critics wrote that "Portal 2" excels in teaching the player to solve puzzles; in a review for the "New York Times", Seth Schiesel wrote, "Somewhere out there an innovative, dynamic high school physics teacher will use "Portal 2" as the linchpin of an entire series of lessons and will immediately become the most important science teacher those lucky students have ever had." Mathematics and science teachers wrote e-mails to Valve to tell them how they had included "Portal" in their classroom lessons as part of a project to promote the "gamification of learning". "Portal" developers Joshua Weier and Yasser Malaika led a team within Valve to explore ways of using "Portal 2" for education. This led to the development of "Puzzle Maker", a level editor for "Portal 2" players, built from the professional tools used to develop the game. Weier and Malaika did not want to design curricula themselves, but wanted to provide educators with tools for creating lesson plans. Hammer, the only tool freely available before the release of the built-in level editor in 2012, was difficult for educators to learn and understand. To address this, Valve gave "Puzzle Maker" an easy-to-learn interface and the ability to share puzzles and lesson plans. The tools were developed with a mathematics teacher and her students. This formed the basis of a new "Steam for Schools" initiative launched in June 2012, under which educators could acquire "Portal 2" and the Puzzle Maker software free of charge for classroom use through its "Teach with Portals" program. In November 2012, Valve estimated that over 2,500 educators were using the "Teach with Portals" software within their lesson plans.


title: Portal 2

text: In 2016, a study demonstrated that the "Portal 2 Puzzle Maker" can be used as a measure of fluid intelligence, similar to the (BOMAT). Referred to as the Portal 2 Test Battery, the participants of the study completed a series of test chambers that progressively became harder.


title: Portal 2

text: Some studies have been conducted to determine if video games can have a significant impact on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Through multiple pretests and post tests, a 2014 study has shown that "Portal 2" can improve problem solving skills, spatial skills, and persistence for a designated task. The participants of this study did not need to have previous gaming experience. Another study done in 2017 found that commercial video games, like "Portal 2", can also increase communication, adaptability and resourcefulness.


title: Portal 2

text: Sixense developed a version of "Portal 2" to support the Razer Hydra motion controller for PC that allows enhanced control of some game elements. Ten extra single-player levels are available as downloadable content for this version. Writer Chet Faliszek said Sixense developers spent nine months to a year in-house at Valve preparing the native version. A limited edition of the Razer Hydra comes bundled with a copy of "Portal 2" for PC.


title: Portal 2

text: The announcement that "Portal 2" would be available on PlayStation 3 came as a surprise to the industry because Gabe Newell had criticized that console in the past, citing difficulties in the port of "The Orange Box". The move toward the PlayStation 3 was a result of growing frustration with Microsoft's policies for Xbox 360 content, including the difficulty of releasing patches and new content. Newell saw Sony's publication model as more open, allowing Steam-like features to be used on the console. "Portal 2" was the first PlayStation 3 game to support a subset of features from Steamworks, including automatic updates, downloadable content, and community support. The game supports cross-platform play between the PlayStation 3, Windows, and OS X versions.


title: Portal 2

text: The Steam overlay shows the player's friends on both Steam and the PlayStation Network, with achievements rewarded for both Steam and PlayStation Network Trophies. Players can unlock the game on Steam for Windows and OS X for no additional charge. The integration of Steamworks on the PlayStation 3 allows Valve to collect data about problems that arise after shipping and push appropriate updates. Valve has stated they do not plan on integrating other PlayStation 3 features, such as 3D television or PlayStation Move support. In June 2012, Valve announced that the PlayStation 3 version would be patched later that year to include support for the PlayStation Move motion controller, and to add the additional content that was previously provided with the Hydra, under the name "Portal 2 In Motion". The patch was released in early November 2012. A free co-op add-on for the "Portal 2 In Motion" content was added in June 2013. Valve said that despite additional support for PlayStation 3 over Xbox 360, the core game is the same on both platforms.


title: Portal 2

text: As of February 2014, SteamOS, Valve's own Linux-based operating system, supports "Portal 2" and its predecessor, as do most modern Debian-based Linux distributions on its services via the Steam client. Released as a Beta in early 2014 for Linux distributions, it holds all of the same traits as the other versions, retaining cross-platform play, split screen and fully native controller support.


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal 2" was a strong favorite of gaming journalists during closed-door previews at the E3 2010 convention. The Game Critics Awards, selected by journalists and critics, awarded "Portal 2" the title of Best PC Game and Best Action/Adventure Game, and nominated the game for Best of Show and Best Console Game. "IGN" named "Portal 2" as its Best of E3 for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 systems and Best Puzzle Game, and nominated it for Best Overall Game. "GameSpy" named "Portal 2" the Best Overall Game and Best Puzzle Game of E3. "Portal 2" won the 2010 Spike Video Game Award for "Most Anticipated Game for 2011".


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal 2" received universal acclaim upon release. Several reviewers identified "Portal 2" as an early contender for "Game of the Year", while others called it one of the best games of all time. Upon release, the game was widely considered to be as good as or better than the original. "Eurogamer"s Oli Welsh said that the game avoids the normal pitfalls that developers introduce in sequels, stating that ""Portal" is perfect. "Portal 2" is not. It's something better than that." Gus Mastrapa of "The A.V. Club" wrote that with "Portal 2", Valve had alleviated any doubts that ""Portal" could be expanded into a big, narrative experience with all the bells and whistles of a mainstream gaming hit". "IGN"s Charles Onyett wrote that the sequel "makes the original look like the prototype it was" by expanding the game in gameplay and story.


title: Portal 2

text: Most reviewers praised the writing and voice acting in the game. Dan Stapleton of "PC Gamer" was able to predict many of the plot twists within "Portal 2" story but "still looked forward to witnessing exactly how the characters would react"; he praised the development of the characters, as "their charm makes what would otherwise be an empty and lifeless world feel boisterous and alive". The characters were well received. Onyett wrote that Merchant's "obvious enthusiasm for the role benefits the game" and that the "consistently clever writing perfectly complements the onscreen action". "Game Informer" Adam Biessener considered Johnson to be an even better character than GLaDOS, and praised the game's "pitch-perfect delivery" and "brilliant comedic timing". In contrast, Peter Bright of "Ars Technica" wrote that compared to the loneliness and despair he felt while playing the first game, the characters, Wheatley and GLaDOS, lost some of this feeling and "the inane babble served only to disrupt the mood".


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal 2"s additional gameplay elements, like light bridges, lasers, and the gels, were praised as appropriate additions to the game. Reviewers were pleased with the difficulty of the puzzles throughout the game, which appeared visually complicated at first but had uncomplicated solutions. "Time"s Evan Narcisse said that he feared the addition of new gameplay elements would "dilute the purity of the experience, but everything's still executed with Valve's high level of charm and panache." Tom Hoggins of "The Telegraph" praised the manner with which these elements were introduced through a "brilliant learning curve of direction, rather than instruction", and considered it a "design ethos that is supremely generous, but dealt with marvellous economy". Chris Kohler of "Wired" wrote that the game's puzzles "never require excessively complicated solutions", and that much of the puzzle solving is "filled with moments that will have you slapping your forehead and thinking, 'Oh my God, I'm such an idiotwhy didn't I see that before?. Stapleton was not as pleased with the gel additions as with the other new mechanics, calling it "difficult to control". He felt that they have "only a couple of uses at most". Bright felt that "Portal 2" was easier than its predecessor, in part that he felt much of the game was effectively tutorials for the new gameplay additions, requiring "careful use of the tools provided", leaving him with the impression that "the game was on rails".


title: Portal 2

text: The cooperative puzzle solving aspect was highlighted as a valuable addition to the game. Welsh called the cooperative mode "one of the most satisfying and genuinely collaborative gaming experiences you can have with a friend". Onyett wrote, "Valve knows how a good co-operative mode requires a game design that doesn't simply encourage but requires you to work together. In "Portal 2", communication is vital to success". Several reviewers praised the non-verbal cues that players could initiate to work with their partners. "Portal 2" was praised for the amount of detail in its design, sound, and music. Nelson credited the "sheer amount of detail" put into the game's world, and wrote, "it all feels very real and natural with brief moments where you're simply sucked into this world". Onyett was impressed with the amount of visual details and capabilities Valve achieved from their Source game engine and that the added details and animations of the levels "consistently serv[ed] not only to entertain the eye but to expand our understanding of the game's characters". Hoggins wrote that the game's world reacted to the player-character Chell's presence "in a startlingly organic way", and praised Valve's design as "an achievement of world-building that compares favourably with "BioShock" underwater city of Rapture".


title: Portal 2

text: Some reviewers said that the second act of the game, taking place in the less-structured portion of the old Aperture facilities, may be confusing to some players. Young wrote that in the second act, the game "cranks up the difficulty level at a speed that may dishearten casual gamers", and said that particularly when traveling between chambers, he had "absolutely no idea where I was supposed to head next". Kohler wrote that while the player can explore the abandoned areas of Aperture, "none of it ever does anythingit's just a lot of sterile, duplicated, non-interactive environments". Watters wrote that the loading time between the game's levels, in contrast to earlier Valve games, are "long enough to make you take notice and wish they were shorter". Watters also said that it was unfortunate that the game lacks "stand-alone test chambers and leaderboards ... but even so, "Portal 2" is not light on content" without these. Welsh said that the attempt to recapture the spirit of the song "Still Alive" at the end credits of "Portal 2" "was a mistake". Video game critic Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw wrote in his Extra Punctuation column that, while "Portal 2" was a "very good game", it unnecessarily retconned portions of the original game's story, and did not really further the game's concept. However, this criticism was directed solely at the campaign, and he stated that he found the game's co-op to be "much more appealing and much more within the spirit of the original".


title: Portal 2

text: On April 20, 2011, it was reported that customers had launched a protest against perceived shortcomings of "Portal 2". Users complained that the game was too shortsome saying that it is only four hours long, about the existence of paid, downloadable content for some versions at launch, and that the Windows and OS X versions were ports of the console version. Other journalists countered that the quality of the graphics on the Windows and Mac versions did not suggest a simple console port. Stephen Totilo of "Kotaku" wrote that the game lasted nine hours and that the downloadable content consisted purely of cosmetic add-ons. Some journalists said that the minimal impact of "The Potato Sack" alternative reality game on the early release of "Portal 2" may be influencing the user scores.


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal 2" won the title of "Ultimate Game of the Year" at the 2011 Golden Joystick Awards, and ranked second place on "Time's" "Top 10 Video Games of 2011". "Gamasutra", "IGN", "Eurogamer", "Kotaku", the Associated Press, and "The Mirror" listed "Portal 2" as their top video game of 2011. The game received twelve nominations including "Game of the Year" for the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, where it was the most-nominated title, and won for "Best PC Game", "Best Male Performance" for Stephen Merchant, "Best Female Performance" for Ellen McLain, "Best Downloadable Content", and "Best Multiplayer Game". The title was nominated for five Game Developers Choice Awards for 2012, including "Game of the Year", and won in the "Best Narrative", "Best Audio" and "Best Game Design" categories. It was nominated for ten Interactive Achievement Awards (now known as the D.I.C.E. Awards), including "Game of the Year", from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, and won the awards for "Outstanding Achievement in Connectivity", "Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition", and "Outstanding Character Performance" for Wheatley. "Portal 2" was nominated for six BAFTA video game award categories, and won in the "Best Game", "Best Story" and "Best Design" categories. The Game Audio Network Guild awarded the game for "Best Dialog", "Best Interactive Score", and "Best Original Vocal – Pop" (for "Want You Gone"). In the inaugural New York Videogame Critics Circle Awards, "Portal 2" was given the top honors for best writing and best acting. The Perpetual Testing Initiative add-on was awarded the 2012 Golden Joystick for "Best Use of DLC". "Portal 2" was nominated for the 2016 Steam Awards by the Steam community and won the award for “Villain Most In Need Of A Hug”.


title: Portal 2

text: Based on sales data from Amazon.com, "Portal 2" was the best-selling game in the United States in the first week of its release, but was overtaken by "Mortal Kombat" in its second week. According to NPD Group, "Portal 2" was the second-best selling game in the U.S. in April 2011, at 637,000 copies, and the fourth-best selling in May. However, NPD does not include sales on Valve's Steam platform. "Portal 2" was the best selling game in the U.K. in the first week of its release, the first number-one for a Valve game. It retained the top spot during its second week.


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal 2" was released a few days before the PlayStation Network outage. "Gamasutra" analyst Matt Matthews said that, based on NPD Group data, the outage "did not seriously affect retail sales of software", but some developers did report drops in sales. ShopToNews analyst Joe Anderson expected that the effect of the outage on UK sales of "Portal 2" would be mild. On June 22, Newell announced that "Portal 2" had sold 3 million copies. , Electronic Arts stated that more than 2 million copies of "Portal 2" have been sold by retailers worldwide. In an August 2011 interview, Newell stated that ""Portal 2" did better on the PC than it did on the consoles". Upon release of the Perpetual Testing Initiative in May 2012, Newell stated that "Portal 2" had shipped more than 4 million units, with the personal computer versions outselling the console versions. Overall, "Portal" and "Portal 2" had together shipped more than 8 million units.


title: Portal 2

text: In addition to player-created levels, there have been complete mods of "Portal 2" created by users. Several notable mods are self-contained playable campaigns in their own right, and have earned critical acclaim.


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal Stories: Mel" is a single-player mod of "Portal 2" developed by Prism Studios, a group made up of eight fans of the "Portal" series. The mod was released on June 25, 2015, for Windows, OS X and Linux systems, available freely to people that own "Portal 2" on Steam.


title: Portal 2

text: "Aperture Tag: The Paint Gun Testing Initiative" is a single-player modification of "Portal 2" developed by "The Aperture Tag Team" released in 2014. The mod replaces the portal gun with a gun that can shoot the various gels (mimicking how "Tag: the Power of Paint" worked) to otherwise various portal-based puzzles.


title: Portal 2

text: "Thinking with Time Machine" is a single player mod for "Portal 2" created by Ruslan Rybka and released in 2014, which gives the player the ability to record actions that can be played back by a duplicate of the player-character, including the use of a second set of portals.


title: Portal 2

text: "Portal Reloaded" is a single-player mod for "Portal 2" created by Jannis Brinkmann and was released on April 19, 2021, exactly 10 years after the release of "Portal 2". The mod gives players the ability to fire a third portal, the "time portal", to travel between the present and future versions of each test chamber.


title: Sun Gym gang

text: The Sun Gym Gang were active in Miami, Florida, during the mid-1990s and were responsible for the murders of Frank Griga and Krisztina Furton along with the kidnapping, extortion, and attempted murder of Marc Schiller. The gang was composed mostly of bodybuilders who frequented the Sun Gym in Miami Lakes, Florida, including Daniel Lugo and Adrian Doorbal. Pete Collins published a three-part series in the "Miami New Times" in 1999 and 2000 chronicling the stories of the gang titled "Pain and Gain" which was then loosely adapted into the 2013 film "Pain & Gain" directed by Michael Bay.


title: Sun Gym gang

text: In 1993 Daniel Lugo was the manager of the Sun Gym, a bodybuilder hangout in Miami Lakes, Florida. In 1991, Lugo had been arrested and plead guilty to fraud, serving a fifteen-month sentence in addition to a three-year federal probation period. He had been convicted of fraud for pretending to be part of a Hong Kong bank looking to invest in American small businesses—the scheme involved collecting up-front fees for loan insurance and then not delivering any loans. Noel Doorbal worked part-time at the gym alongside Lugo. During 1994, Carl Weekes moved from New York to Miami to live with his girlfriend's cousin, Stevenson Pierre. Pierre had been hired by Lugo in February 1994 to create a collection agency for overdue gym membership payments. When this didn't work out, he remained at the gym first as the back-office manager in the weight room before ending up as a desk clerk. Jorge Delgado worked with Daniel Lugo as his personal trainer at the Sun Gym. It was Delgado's relationship with Lugo that caused a rift between Delgado and the Sun Gym Gang's first victim: Marc Schiller. Jorge Delgado and Marc Schiller had been business partners since about 1991, and Schiller trusted Delgado so much that Delgado knew the alarm code and layout of Schiller's home.


title: Sun Gym gang

text: In a 1994 meeting, Daniel Lugo asked Noel Doorbal and Stevenson Pierre whether they were interested in making $100,000 for two days' work. According to Lugo, businessman Marc Schiller had stolen $100,000 from him and $200,000 from another gym member named Jorge Delgado. At another meeting a few days later, Delgado agreed to the plan to abduct Schiller and force him to sign over his assets, and potentially kill him. Delgado was able to give specific information about Schiller, including the codes to his house.


title: Sun Gym gang

text: The gang had varying plans and made attempts to kidnap Schiller. They planned to wear ninja outfits for Halloween and knock on Schiller's door; this plan did not transpire. On an early morning in November, Doorbal, Pierre, and Weekes, dressed in black and wearing gloves and black military camouflage makeup, crawled across the lawn, planning to storm the house when Schiller went to get the papers. However, a passing car scared them off.


title: Sun Gym gang

text: In total, there were seven failed abductions. The final failed abduction occurred on Thursday, November 14, 1994. After this last failed attempt, Doorbal and Weekes dropped Pierre and recruited Mario Sanchez, or "Big Mario," a former Sun Gym weightlifting instructor and licensed Florida private eye.


title: Sun Gym gang

text: That same afternoon, Schiller was waiting for a prospective buyer at a Schlotzsky's franchise delicatessen he owned. When, at 4 pm, the buyer still had not turned up, Schiller left and was grabbed by three men while walking across the parking lot, who stunned him with tasers and then punched him and forced him into a van. The Sun Gym gang then took Schiller to Delgado's warehouse. That evening, they retrieved Schiller's car from the Deli parking lot and drove it to the warehouse. That first evening the gang made Schiller call his wife and tell her to go with his children to Colombia, giving the gang access to his house. For weeks, the gang made Schiller tell a series of stories and, under pressure, sign over all of his assets, making dozens of requests for his autographs. Initially planned as a two-day abduction, the abduction went over weeks as they converted assets from Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. The last money transfer was made on December 10. Finally, the gang decided they would kill Schiller with a 2 million dollars MetLife Insurance policy designated to Lugo's ex-wife Lillian Torres as the new beneficiary.


title: Sun Gym gang

text: The gang planned to get Schiller drunk over a few days and send him out in his car in a fatal crash. At 2:30 am on December 15, after three days of forced drinking, Schiller was placed into the passenger seat of his car with Lugo driving while Weekes and Doorbal followed in the Camry. A crash site was chosen three blocks south of Schlotzky's. Schiller was then strapped into the driver's seat, and Lugo moved into the passenger side and stomped the gas pedal and steered the vehicle toward a concrete utility pole jumping out just before the collision. When Lugo inspected the wreckage, Schiller was alive but unconscious. Lugo then splashed gasoline over him and lit it on fire, however, Schiller opened the door and climbed out of the car. The gang chased him in their cars, nailing him against a wall. They almost went back to hit Schiller again, but another car approached, causing them to run away.


title: Sun Gym gang

text: Schiller was admitted into the hospital on December 16, 1994, being treated as a John Doe and possible DUI case. Meanwhile, the Sun Gym Gang, after hearing of no one being admitted into the morgue, started calling the area hospitals. They discovered that Schiller was at South Miami Hospital and in a critical but stable condition. The gang visited the hospital intending to kill Schiller, but he had already been transferred to Jackson Memorial Hospital.