Aperture Science Open House

Pix

We do what we must, because we can.

Intro/Queue: Aperture Science Open House is a classic dark ride hosted by Wheatley taking guests through some of the events and locations of Portal 2. The ride and queue are contained inside a rather basic academia show building with Aperture Science listed above the door. Guests enter the building into a 1950’s lobby area with a few unstable looking fold out chairs, a variety of flyers for volunteer testing and a portrait of Cave Johnson, founder of Aperture Science. As guests progress down the hallway they can see “bring your kid to work day” experiments and drawings of lemons and cake. While boarding guests hear a new voice calling itself Wheatley and instructing guests to step gently inside their portal transportation vehicles and that he will catch up with us later in the tour.

Act One: The first part of the ride itself goes through the 1950’s, 60’s, and 70’s levels of testing usually found later in the game. Guests move through 3 different room scenes following a pair of robots (Atlas and P-Body, although not named, as an easter egg to the co-op story) testing both the portal guns and the repulsion, propulsion and conversion gels, while listening to the recordings of Cave Johnson about the gels, the experiments, and his slow descent into madness and moon dust poisoning.

Act Two: Moving into the ruins of the upper laboratories, guests are now greeted by Wheatley again who is very glad to see us, especially as he has now taken over the testing area and is excited to have new volunteers for his new testing rooms. Unfortunately for him, all of his testing rooms are flawed to the point of not needing any solving at all. We hear GLaDOS, who is in fact a potato now, explain that he is a personality core that was meant to dampen her more violent tendencies, and was never supposed to have full control of anything. With GLaDOS helping, guests manage to get out of the endless testing loop and sneak out of a service door to take down Wheatley.

Wheatley


GLaDOS (in potato form)


Act Three: Moving through these back hallways GLaDOS explains what needs to happen for her to replace Wheatley; the different personality cores, and how they can use them to overload his system so they can transfer her back in. Reaching the room Wheatley is in GLaDOS successfully makes the switch and throws the other cores into space. The last room before guests exit into the attached gift shop is a basic white room decorated like a generic party with a few banners, some balloons, a partly cut cake, and the instrumental version of "Want You Gone" playing in the background.

GLaDOS (in full form)