Normally the sign of a good story is when we spend half an hour Googling it to make sure we haven’t been suckered by one of those annoying hoax sites. But this seems to be completely legit: Portal is coming to Android, specifically through the NVidia Shield.
The Shield is, of course, yet another Android console that nobody seems to want, and yet hardware manufacturers keep producing. So apparently they decided to just cut out the middle man and ask Valve to adapt Portal themselves, and Valve claims to be tickled about it:
“NVIDIA has created a very powerful and unique device with SHIELD,” said Doug Lombardi at Valve. “Our companies have a strong history working together and we’re looking forward to Portal‘s arrival on SHIELD.”
Of course Valve is tickled about it: NVidia essentially asked them “Hey, can we do the heavy lifting to show you where you need to work on Steam For Android?” What NVidia gets out of the deal is that elusive killer app that’s been hiding from them for so long. If the Shield can get relatively recent PC games onto it as Android exclusives, well… that’s going to be a bigger lure than the PC streaming that seems to constantly be a work in progress.
Honestly, it also seems likely that the Shield will, the next go-round, be a device that can run Steam OS. After all, it already has a truly ridiculous processor in the works, and NVidia has made no secret of its plans to become a CPU manufacturer. But, of course, this is all speculation: For now, if you want Portal on the go, you’ll have to buy a Shield.