Po-tay-to Po-tah-to

Tiffasaurus requested that I explain the potatoes. I suspect most of the confusion comes from the fact that they are not as tasty as cake.

The best way to lean about this is here. This person was more involved and knew more than I did. I'm just sharing what I knew.

There is a group of games called the Potato Sack. A little irrelevant but interesting background here: in December when steam was having tons of indie games on sale, a list of the Indie Packs was released. Among them was the Potato Pack. The Potato Pack was never released, some people were pissed and everyone thought it was a dumb name. Cut to April 1st and the Potato Sack is released. "Ohhhh," we said. "That's where it went."

When the potato sack was released, people realized that each game included various hidden references to potatoes. On April 7th (but I didn't learn until later), the potato games were updated to include secret levels or certain achievements. By completing these levels or obtaining these achievements, one could earn potatoes.

I did not learn about this until April 15th, when a countdown clock appeared at glados@home. The countdown ended midday on Friday. I thought the game would be released by then. Sadly, no. When the countdown ended, the page loaded with MORE countdowns. I felt like I was playing Progress Quest 2011! (You can see screenshots of the counters for each game and the counter for potatoes here.)

By playing the games in the Potato Sack and achieving potatoes, we believed we would pave the way for Portal 2 to be released early.

For a whole weekend, we frantically played games. Some brave bastards sat through Amnesia. They were kind enough to remain on Steam voice chat, and that certainly brightened my day.

In the end, we realized that Valve wasn't going to release Portal 2 early. However, they did reward individuals who obtained all 36 potatoes. Those Golden Potato people started playing Portal 2 one hour before everyone else, and the received Valve's complete library, with any extra copies being giftable.

I hope this explains the potatoes well enough, Tiffasaurus. Please let me know if you have any further questions. I will try my hardest to answer them quickly and throughly.

You can read about how to achieve the potatoes here. Of course, you are a few days too late.