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J.J. Abrams Might Produce 'Portal' and/or 'Half-Life' Movies

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It’s clear at this point that J.J. Abrams will not be satisfied until he has control of every nerdy property in existence. Yesterday, at the DICE Summit, a Las Vegas gathering of video game execs, Abrams and Gabe Newell, founder and director of revolutionary game developer Valve, announced a partnership during a joint keynote address called “Storytelling Across Platforms: Who Benefits Most, the Audience or the Player?”

Valve is best known for the Half-Life series, which changed first-person shooters as we know them, and Steam, their games network which has been at the forefront of digital distribution. Abrams is, of course, best known for needlessly withholding every detail about his cliched movies right up until their release.

Quoth Abrams: “There’s an idea we have for a game that we’d like to work with Valve on.” Quoth Newell: “We’re going to figure out if we can make a Portal movie or Half-Life movie together.”

Half-Life is about a scientist who battles an onslaught of alien invaders after an experiment goes horribly wrong. Portal is a puzzle-based spin-off of that series, following a woman trapped in a testing facility with an insane AI and a gun that can create wormholes. Both are pretty great game series, but there’s nothing about either that’s particularly screaming out for a film adaptation. But since when has that ever stopped Hollywood?

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