Chell

"You've been wrong about every single thing you've ever done, including this thing. You're not smart. You're not a scientist. You're not a doctor. You're not even a full-time employee! Where did your life go so wrong?"

- GLaDOS

Chell is an Aperture Science Test Subject, and the esoteric, silent protagonist of Portal and Portal 2.

Background
Although Chell's origins are unknown, she was most definitely among the people present during GLaDOS's activation in 200-, as GLaDOS locked down the facility after her activation, letting none escape, or be let in from the outside.

Portal
Over 20 years after GLaDOS' takeover of Aperture Laboratories, Chell is awaken from some sort of stasis pod in a Relaxation Vault by GLaDOS, who speaks to her as if she is just a mandatory Test Subject. Chell is released from the Vault through a portal, and begins to progress through a series of Test Chambers, which are showing signs of decay and neglect, and GLaDOS showing signs of instability. By Test Chamber 02, Chell acquires the first model of the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, which can only shoot blue portals. The gun is further upgraded to create both blue and orange portals in Test Chamber 11. Throughout the test, GLaDOS continues to act like everything is perfectly mandatory, giving apparently scripted responses. Despite this, she lets slip several phrases to suggest otherwise, and malfunctions in the middle of sentences. She also continuously promises cake and grief counseling at the conclusion of the test.



When Chell eventually makes it to Test Chamber 16, GLaDOS informs her that the appropriate chamber has been replaced with a live fire course designed for Military Androids, simply wishing Chell the best of luck and letting her into the chamber, where she is met with Sentry Guns for the first time. It is in this chamber that Chell discovers a hidden alcove in the wall, where desperate messages were scribbled on the walls by former Aperture employee Doug Rattmann, who seemed to have gone slightly mad while being trapped in the facility. The most prominent message, "the cake is a lie", is written several times. Chell proceeds to the next chamber, where GLaDOS introduces her to the Companion Cube, which Chell must carry through the chamber. She once again finds messages from Rattmann, who became insanely attached to his Companion Cube, and grieved over its "death". At the end of the chamber, Chell's Cube meets the same fate, where she is forced to incinerate it in order to proceed.



At the conclusion of the test, Chell travels on an Aperture Science Unstationary Scaffold away from the final Test Chamber. But instead of the constantly promised cake, the young woman is met with an incinerator. Using the ASHPD, she narrowly escapes certain death, and journeys through the abandoned maintenance areas, despite discouragement from GLaDOS. Throughout the decaying and neglected maintenance areas, Chell finds that Rattmann has been roaming around the facility for some time, with hints and scribblings guiding her along the right path. After constant admonishment from GLaDOS and a massive Sentry Gun ambush, Chell finally finds herself in GLaDOS' main control room, where the A.I. has been sitting alone for over twenty years. GLaDOS attempts to deploy a "surprise" to eliminate Chell, but ends up accidentally detaching her Morality Core, which Chell promptly incinerates.



GLaDOS, now free of her morality, begins to flood the Enrichment Center with neurotoxins, which she once did to kill the Aperture employees she held captive (resulting in her Morality Core being added in the first place). GLaDOS notes that the Morality Core must have had some ancillary responsibilities, and that she cannot shut off the Rocket Sentry in her control room. Chell uses this to her advantage, and uses portals to redirect the rockets back at GLaDOS, detaching and incinerating her Personality Cores one by one. Before the neurotoxins can kill her, Chell destroys GLaDOS who is apparently sucked through a portal to the outside with parts of her generator. Chell is also dragged with her, and she ends up among GLaDOS' remains on the parking lot in front of the Aperture labs entrance, only to be taken back inside into stasis by the Party Escort Bot.

Despite GLaDOS's apparent destruction however, only a part of her was destroyed. GLaDOS reactivates a room full of Personality Cores and re-captures Aperture Laboratories, filing a letter to Chell, telling her that she is still alive and "not even angry" at her, but not before extinguishing a candle on the cake, which was not a lie after all.

Portal 2


Hundreds of years after GLaDOS' partial destruction, Chell is awakened from stasis by Wheatley, a Personality Core who has become concerned with the state of the facility, and convinces Chell to escape with him. Chell agrees, and they set out through the maintenance areas, which along the rest of the facility, are in decaying ruin, overrun with nature. After reaching an elevator, Wheatley attempts to activate it, but it is on override and starts descending. Before Wheatley can stop it, they reach the bottom, where can be found the remains of GLaDOS' chamber. GLaDOS awakens, and is quick to accuse Chell of murdering her years ago. Chell is then forced back into the testing area, where she must complete more tests.

Appearance
Chell appears to be in her late 20s or early 30s, and of mixed ancestry or possibly Latin or Japanese descent (Chell's face and body model, Alésia Glidewell, is of Brazilian and Japanese ancestry), and is rather thin. Throughout the game she wears a worn-out (especially around the knees) orange jumpsuit and has bare feet. She has a ponytail and mild "bed hair" from sleeping in a stasis pod for an unknown period of time, dark and tired eyes, and Advanced Knee Replacement prosthesis surgically attached to her legs.

Personality and skills


Based on her success in the Test Chambers and subsequent escape, it can be surmised that Chell is highly determined and a quick, inventive thinker. Other than that, little is known about her personality and background. All further information about her comes from comments by GLaDOS, who is by no means a reliable source of information, since she seems to often lie to Chell to make her feel guilty about her actions. For instance, according to GLaDOS, Chell's personnel file says she was adopted and is "unlikable" in character.

Chell was in the Aperture Laboratories at the time of GLaDOS' takeover, meaning she had some business there. This is supported when GLaDOS angrily tells her "You're not smart. You're not a scientist. You're not a doctor. You're not even a full-time employee!", suggesting she had some sort of part-time job at Aperture. However, frequent mention of the Aperture Science first-annual-bring-your-daughter-to-work-day, which occurred on the day of GLaDOS' takeover, suggests that Chell was an employees' daughter, who was captured for GLaDOS' permanent testing cycle. Unless, of course, GLaDOS is lying again.

In an apparent attempt to convince Chell not to kill her, GLaDOS tells her, "I have your brain scanned and permanently backed up in case something terrible happens to you." Later, in a fit of anger, she claims to have deleted this backup, adding, "The part of you that could have survived indefinitely is gone. I just struck you from the permanent record. Your entire life has been a mathematical error... a mathematical error I'm about to correct." It is currently unknown why GLaDOS might have done this (fan speculation often points at Chell being a clone or an android), and whether it might be a hint about Chell's origins. On the other hand, the whole idea might well be a complete fabrication, like many of GLaDOS' other statements.

As a Test Subject, Chell also is fitted with Advanced Knee Replacement, small spring devices surgically attached to her legs that assist her jumping and walking skills and allow her to fall great distances without being hurt.

Behind the scenes



 * The heel springs were originally created for the Combine Assassin, cut from Half-Life 2. They were reused as the Advanced Knee Replacement for Portal due to disbelief by playtesters that Chell could survive the drops she was subject to, particularly those that involved falling recursively through portals.


 * Chell's real life reference model is Alésia Glidewell. She also served as the base for the original model of Left 4 Dead's Zoey.


 * It has been stated by Gabe Newell in an October 2007 interview that Chell has importance in the overall Half-Life universe, and will eventually have a fairly significant relationship with some of the other characters that we are already familiar with.


 * In the original Portal trailer, a balding male Test Subject is used as a placeholder for Chell. While it cannot be clearly seen, it may be the Half-Life 2 "male 07" Citizen.


 * As seen in a very early Portal screenshot, the hands and forearms of the ASHPD user were to be featured in the viewmodel. Chell's right hand and forearm are still present in the final viewmodel, although the texture is broken. However the texture file can still be found in the game files, revealing what may be an early Aperture Science logo, followed by the number "122-7605", possibly an early Test Subject ID. These are not featured in Chell's model, which probably did not (at least fully) exist at that time of the game's development.


 * As seen in the texture folder for Chell's model, it appears that she was at some point to wear a fancy hairclip (as the texture "chell_hairclip.vtf"), replaced in the final game by a simple ring / elastic.


 * As with all the playable characters in the Half-Life universe, Chell is silent. However female Citizen sounds (by Mary Kae Irvin) are reused when she is hurt.




 * As stated by Matt Charlesworth, designer of the Portal 2 Chell, she was really successful in the first Portal. She fit into the world really well and complemented it without the distractions that a more flashy character would bring, and served well her utilitarian purpose. However when the team started working on Portal 2, they were not sure whether they would bring her back or not, and explored a few other characters before returning to Chell, when they realized removing her would not benefit the game.


 * In Portal, Chell's orange jumpsuit is similar to the common American prison outfit. According to Bay Raitt, the team put Chell in an orange jumpsuit to reinforce the fact that she is a Test Subject. Visually, the warmer orange colors help her pop out against the colder tones of the environment. For Portal 2, her outfit was redesigned to reflect her "lab rat" status.


 * That new outfit went through many concepts before the final one was chosen: as stated by Matt Charlesworth, some of the concepts started with a sporty, motorcycle gear like look, which was very different from the original orange outfit, even though they were still going for clean and simple. They played around with proportion as well, trying to play a lot more with extreme feminine proportions and a totally different color scheme. They also explored changing Chell's nationality for a little bit, since her true nationality has never been explored nor revealed.


 * The constraints the team had were that Chell was supposed to be dressed by machines, so any markings on the suit would have been on there for readability by a computer. That includes machine-read imagery, and what extra things might be on that kind of suit, but they eventually leaned away from the bar code design, because they reckoned it has been done quite a bit before, and originality is something Charlesworth really associates with Portal. She was never to look as if she had been designed, something the team fought with – to make her still appealing to the player, but not look over designed (the team tends to cut anything that does not serve a real purpose on their characters).




 * In the end, the things the team considered successful were the more minimal, clean, utilitarian looks (nothing was on there for fashion), leading to the final design of a purposely and constantly dehumanized Test Subject, considered by the team as making her look physically capable, but at the same time showing some vulnerability about her (what Charlesworth considers attractive in every person), which they thought to really seem like it belongs in the Portal world.


 * That new design is not supposed to look like a sexy Marvel superhero suit, as Charlesworth states. It is supposed to look like it was designed without any thought of making her look attractive. They team does not want to make her unattractive, but still wants to balance that out, and have Chell look like what she is - a Test Subject, not a prisoner, a janitor, or something else. They also want people to remember that version of the character better than the first one. Before he started working on Portal 2, Charlesworth admits he barely remembered the first Chell.




 * The hat featured in that new design came up around halfway through the conception phase, and it seemed to strike a chord with the whole team. Charlesworth states that is is something that always reminds him of test pilots – people who were subjected to testing and extreme conditions. It also serves a second purpose, because if there is a graphic on it, it is constantly readable from all angles, making it trackable by any computer found in the Enrichment Center. That serves the fiction of her being tested by GLaDOS, and keeps the hair out of her eyes.


 * The team is not sure whether to keep the Advanced Knee Replacement for Portal 2. He states that some team members are attached to it, and that some are not, so they have experimented what to do with them, or how to replace them.


 * Chell's new outfit was revealed as two ASCII art images given by the BBS during the Portal ARG.


 * Originally, Chell was to be one half of the two Portal 2 co-op characters, the other being another woman named Mel. When they were replaced by infinitely respawnable robots, Chell was kept for the singleplayer mode only, and Mel was removed from the storyline.


 * "Chell" may be derived from "Chelle", which is the diminutive of "Michelle". "Chell" is never given in-game, but is mentioned in the Portal end credits and can be found in the game files.

Trivia

 * Judging by the fact that Chell passes through the Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grid every time she goes in an elevator, she may have little to no teeth, since the Material Emancipation Grid emancipates tooth enamel and teeth, among others, in semi-rare cases.


 * It is possible Chell is Test Subject 234, since her stasis bed bears the same number. This has yet to be confirmed however.

List of appearances

 * Portal
 * Portal: First Slice
 * Portal: Still Alive
 * Portal ARG
 * Portal 2