Wheatley

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Weatley
I'll wait--I'll wait one hour. Then I'll come back and, assuming I can locate your dead body, I'll bury you. Alright? Brilliant! Go team! See you in an hour! Hopefully! If you're not... dead.
Wheatley

Wheatley, known by GLaDOS as the Intelligence Dampening Sphere, is a Personality Core of male programming and English West Country accent who first appears in Portal 2. He is Chell's guide through the first part of the game, and helps her to find a way to escape the facility.

Wheatley is voiced by British actor and comedian Stephen Merchant.

Portal 2

See also: Portal 2

During the course of the game, Wheatley aids Chell into escaping from GLaDOS' tests. The two eventually sabotage GLaDOS' turret production line and neurotoxin and later confront GLaDOS herself. A core transference occurs and Wheatley takes over the facility. When he is about to let Chell escape, Wheatley becomes corrupted with power and becomes the game's new main antagonist. Wheatley reconstructs GLaDOS' hardware on to a potato battery and knocks both her and Chell into Aperture Science's old and forgotten test chambers by accident.

After returning from the old test chambers, Chell and GLaDOS learn that Wheatley's actions are causing the facility's reactor to approach a nuclear meltdown. After passing through more test chambers made by Wheatley, he attempts to kill Chell and GLaDOS. After escaping his traps, GLaDOS suggests causing a new core transfer by implanting corrupt Personality Cores into Wheatley.

Chell enters Wheatley's lair to begin the final confrontation of the game. By shutting him down temporarily with bombs, Chell corrupts Wheatley enough to initiate a new core transference, saving the facility from destruction in the progress. However, a stalemate occurs when Wheatley does not agree to transfer himself, and Chell must press the stalemate resolution button to finalize the transfer. However, Wheatley had booby trapped it with explosives, and Chell is flung from the button. Chell survives and launches a portal onto the surface of the Moon, causing both her and Wheatley to be sucked into space. GLaDOS then reacquires her old body and rescues Chell while letting Wheatley be launched into the vacuum of space.

Wheatley is last seen in the epilogue after the end credits, with the Space Core orbiting him, where he wishes he could say he was sorry for all he did to Chell.

Gallery

Trivia

  • Video game-wise, Wheatley appears to be an upgraded version of GLaDOS' Intelligence Core (the one telling the cake recipe), with a blue "eye" and three dots, though Wheatley has dots only on his right side. From early screenshots and the Portal 2 E3 teaser trailer, the model also appears to have been greatly improved and more detailed, with a wider range of emotions.
  • Wheatley's Cockney accent heard in the "Meet Wheatley" video shown at E3 2010 uses a placeholder voice provided by Valve animator Richard Lord.[1] Due to very positive feedback, Valve considered at some point making the voice official.[2] Later Lord himself emphasized that his voice was temporary, saying that "theres no way you will be dissapointed with the final voice - i'm over the moon with who it might be." [sic],[3] until it was announced that Stephen Merchant would provide the final voice.[4]

References

  1. Portal 2 Gains a Talkative Companion on Wired.com
  2. Portal 2 E3 gameplay video (single post) on the NeoGAF forums
  3. "Temp voice!" on Last Outpost of Sanity, Richard Lord's official blog
  4. Gamescom: Portal 2 gets Stephen Merchant on ComputerAndVideoGames.com