Authoring Systems & the Art They Wrought

• Rob Swigart's Portal
• Assembly
• 1986

Portal is the brainchild of writer Rob Swigart who had become interested in Cyberpunk novels of the mid-1980s and their prevalent trope of internet consciousness. This trope became the germ of Swigart's idea that the computer screen is a kind of doorway—a portal—into a different fictional world. After writing a music software program manual for Activision, Swigart proposed his idea for Portal. Swigart's friend, Gilman Louie, who owned a company called Nexa (later Spectrum-Holobyte), came on board as the game's programmer. Meetings with Activision led Swigart to create the game as a database management system. The game was released to much acclaim, in 1986.