Posted on April 21, 2011, CJ Miozzi RUMOR: Portal 2 Competitive Multiplayer On the Way

A poster over at the steam forums stumbled across some console commands that may open the door for competitive multiplayer in Portal 2.

Take a look at these two variables:

“sv_portal_shot_fizzles_enemy_portals” = “0″ game – [PORTALMP] Your portal shots will fizzle any enemy player portals that they hit

“sv_portal_shot_push” = “-1″ game – [PORTALMP] Amount of force to apply to a player if your shot hits them. <= 0 pas

“Enemy” player?

Pushing other players with your shots?

That doesn’t sound very co-operative.

These variables are likely relics of the competitive multiplayer Valve had initially developed for Portal 2. Erik Wolpaw, one of Portal 2′s writers, said this during the summer:

Along with co-op, [we had] the idea of sort of a competitive Portal multiplayer. We went down that path, actually, for a little while and had something up and running — the best way to describe it is sort of speedball meets Portal. You know, a sports analog. And it quickly became apparent that while it’s fun for about two seconds to drop portals under people and things like that, it quickly just devolves into pure chaos. It lost a lot of the stuff that was really entertaining about Portal, which was puzzle-solving. Cooperative puzzle-solving was just a much more rewarding path.

With the code left in the game, it won’t be long before modders resurrect the competitive Portal 2 the developers tried to kill–unless Valve beats them to the punch by releasing their own incarnation.

We reached out to Valve for comment. Check back for an update.