More Portal 2 Secrets Teased at GDC

By Tim Hage on Mar 12th, 2010 at 12:44PM

An interesting BSOD graced the screen of a projector at GDC this week (see above). It seemed completely harmless until gamers looked closer. It seems GLaDOS was behind it all and was offering to fill the area with deadly neurotoxins. Upon closer inspection, the BSOD had even more information to offer. When a dedicated gamer over at the Penny Arcade forums got ahold of the image, he had the following light to shed on the mystery:

“The hex converted to decimal: 226 228 226 : 215 197 213 196 228 213 227 ( 201 ) + 211 197 197 197
If it’s ASCII it’s extended ASCII. Could it be EBCDIC (common mainframe encoding)?
Edit: It IS EBCDIC. It spells: S U S : P E N D … U N T ( I ) L … E E E (colon, dots for spacing, and parens added to roughly locate them in the source image.)
Hey, being QSECOFR on an AS/400 many years ago finally pays off!”

So, there you have it. All that work and excitement and we get a simple message: “Suspended until E3.” Perhaps we’ll actually get some real, non-cryptic details come mid June?

via [Steam Forums]