Portal 2 AR game designed by indie devs

The indie developers featured in the Potato Sack did a lot more than sit back and watch the attention flood in - they were heavily involved in the creation of the PotatoFools AR game.

"Valve invited a bunch of us indie developers to come out last December for a ‘Cross Game Design Event’," Audiosurf creator Dylan Fitterer told Edge.

"Gabe [Newell] kicked it all off. He asked us to work with them in creating an event that put launching Portal 2 into the community’s hands. We were given free rein to design it and were also given access to any IP we wanted."

The thirteen developers designed an enigmatic trail of clues delivered by multiple title updates and messages hidden in Steam communications. Eventually players were led to a page requesting they lend CPU cycles to GLaDOS by playing the Potato Sack bundle.

Unsurprisingly, this led to renewed interest in the featured games.

"It’s definitely been an excellent bump for Audiosurf. Actually, it was more like a mountain than a bump," Fritterer said.

“At one point there were over 6,000 people simultaneously playing Audiosurf. Lately, over three years after launch, Audiosurf usually has around 300 simultaneous players.”

The efforts of players around the world finally saw Portal 2 released worldwide on Steam a few hours ahead of its scheduled US launch, disappointing US fans but delighting those in other territories expecting to wait an extra couple of days.