Something has been bothering me since I finished Portal 2 a few weeks ago: what happened to the combine? From what I've read Aperture Labs was a competitor of Black Mesa and by that I've felt safe to assume that Portal 1/2 takes place in the same universe as the Half-Life series. By Half-Life 2 the combine are raining hell down on earth and seem to have infliltrated the vast majority of Earth even if it means head crabs run rampant like rabbits. At the beginning of Portal 2 it seems pretty clear that Chell has spent many years underground and I got the implication it was more like a thousand year or more. How did Aperture escape the combine? How is the world looking pretty normal when Chell is dropped out into the field above Aperture Labs? The moon looks pretty clean as does space. Maybe humans and the combine wiped each other out?
I don't think it was a thousand years. I was led to the impression that it was only a decade or so. You still probably age when you're in hibernation, and she still looks young in Portal 2. As for how they escaped the combine, I've wondered that myself. My guess is that the combine haven't infiltrated every part of the globe, so maybe Aperture Science is in some remote, largely uninhabited place. Maybe like Black Mesa it's in the American desert, but at the end Chell is in a field, so I don't know. Maybe the field is a hologram. The other thing is the entire facility is underground, so maybe the combine just haven't found it. It's difficult to tell exactly when Portal 1 and 2 take place, though. It's possible that it's actually before the resonance cascade, but probably not because they basically say that Black Mesa stole the portal technology from Aperture - so Portal 1 probably takes place some time near Half Life 1. Valve has stated that Half Life takes place in the same time it was released: 1998. I don't know, it's all kinda mysterious and confusing, but I think that's kinda the point.
glados might have put the place on lockdown when the combine took over and didn't let anyone in or out, maybe thats why theres nobody there because glados kept on using them in test chambers until they died, that also would explain the writings on the walls you see
It has been many years since I completed Half-Life 1 and 2 (didn't do Episode 1 or 2 yet) but I completed Portal then made a start on Portal 2 last night. Anyhow, I'd wager the character woke up either in a remote location, or after the aliens were more or less defeated.
We had a big debate about this in another forum. Valve says GLaDOS was designed to compete against black mesa, and it took over the aperture science facilities using neurotoxins shortly before the resonance cascade event in HL1. Apparently the difference is that glados made a complete lockdown while in black mesa things went completely out of control, and lets be honest who cares about some dingy private company that seemed to be always on the verge of bankruptcy (aperture) when you have a fucking massive portal with an alien army (combine) coming out of it? So the consensus is that Portal1 happens shortly after HL1 and before the two or three decades between that one and HL2, while Portal2 probably happens at the same time that HL2 does. After all the events of HL2 happen on City17 all the way in eastern europe, while the aperture science facilities are in Michigan. And again, dont you remember the part when you're falling down the shaft? the whole aperture complex was built in a massive salt mine several miles deep. In the drawings on the videowalls of the elevators you can see how the only thing on the surface is a small shack, hardly something the combine would care about.
