The Whole Team, Hired on the Spot

Valve poached a DigiPen student project on sight and turned it into Portal. Twenty-one years later the same trick just got orphaned back to peer-to-peer hosting.

In 2005, at a DigiPen reverse career fair, a student team led by designer Kim Swift showed off Narbacular Drop, a dungeon game where you shot a blue portal and an orange one into any wall and fell through one to rocket out the other. Valve reps in the room flew the whole team to Bellevue to present it, and Gabe Newell reportedly offered to hire every single one of them on the spot — no separate interviews, no negotiation, just come remake this in our engine. That remake was Portal.

Twenty-one years on, the same two-portal trick is the reason a different game just got orphaned. 1047 Games built Splitgate around it, a live-service shooter that borrowed the mechanic wholesale for competitive multiplayer — and in September the studio ended active development on both Splitgate: Arena Reloaded and Empulse, killed the dedicated servers, and pushed everyone still playing onto peer-to-peer hosting. GameSpot's headline said it better than I can: "Portal-like shooter Splitgate died once, and it's dying again."

A mechanic that impressed Gabe Newell into hiring an entire graduating class before they'd even filed paperwork is now the reason grown adults are hosting matches off whatever server happens to still be up. Full circle, minus the WiFi.