Portal Timeline Including Fan Content (accurate to the best of my ability)
1944 Cave Johnson buy a salt mine and starts Aperture Science Innovators
1950’s Aperture’s heyday! Astronauts, war heroes and Olympians come to Aperture to help advance science
1952 Testing on Repulsion Gel begins
Portal Stories: Mel; Mel arrives at Aperture and goes into long term relaxation
1953 The first quantum tunnelling portal technology is created
1968 Aperture is investigated by the US Senate over missing astronauts.
1971 Testing begins on Propulsion Gel
Aperture now promises to give $60 to anyone desperate enough to volunteer for testing
1981 Cave Johnson buys moonrock, finds it makes a good portal surface and turns it into Conversion Gel. He also finds that he’s allergic to moon rock and develops cancer (Fun fact! Moon dust does give people allergic like reactions. We don’t know how toxic it is)
1982 Cave starts looking for a way to live forever through technology. He says that if he dies before it’s finished, his assistant Caroline is to be put in charge of Aperture whether she wants to or not. If they need to, he tells them to put her in his machine – once it’s finished – and make her immortal.
Aperture starts to have AI staff.
The human staff are now forced to be test subjects.
Portal: Revolution; One of the scientists working on brain mapping technology is Emilia Conly.
1986 Aperture finds out Black Mesa is working on portal technology. In response, Aperture starts properly working on developing GLaDOS
Late 1980’s or early 1990’s Aperture Desk Job; A personality core called Grady and a human Aperture employee test toilets. They make toilet turrets and meet a version of Cave who survived death by becoming a giant robot head.
Robot-head-Cave begs for death but can’t be killed. He falls into the bowels of Aperture where he will live forever. Grady and the human Aperture employee go into witness protection.
1990’s Caroline is forced into having her mind uploaded into GLaDOS
GLaDOS tries to kill everyone
The scientists attach personality cores on her, to try and control her
Extrusion tunnels are invented
2000’s GLaDOS kills almost all the scientists and begins perpetual testing
Portal Reloaded; An AI learns that GLaDOS will be defeated at some point in the future. They wake test subject 4509 and gets her to test with the triple portal gun, in the hope that she’ll be able to change the future
GLaDOS makes the Lazer Redirection Cubes
Lab Rat; Doug Rattmann puts Chell at the top of the testing list
Portal 1; you know how it goes
Between Portal and Portal 2
With no humans or central core to tell them what to do, some of the AIs start to do their own thing
Aperture starts to fall apart
Portal Reloaded; Test subject 4509 and the time aware AI appear, solve tests and go back in time.
Test subject 4509 escapes and probably dies almost immediately
Betty Help; Betty wants to help everyone
Portal: Revolution; Aperture continues to decay. A cleaning core called Stirling decided to reactive GLaDOS by getting a test subject to use the Spire. The Spire doesn’t work as intended, things get teleported about and the test subject ends up deep underground.
Emilia Conly has a copy of her memory and personality uploaded into a core. Emilia and the test subject stop Stirling and they end up on the moon.
The Underground; Due to the shenanigans in Portal Revolution, another one of Cave’s try-to-cheat-death machines is activated. A version of Cave finds himself in the Mainframe.
The Mainframe instructs some Aperture AIs to set up a sifting system for cores. Cores the Mainframe likes get added to the Mainframe. Cores he doesn’t like get turned into Party Escort Robots.
Portal Stories: Mel; Virgil falls into old Aperture. He wakes up Mel and gets her to help him get back up. The two inadvertently triggering AEGIS. AEGIS sees them as a threat and try to kill them.
AEGIS shakes Aperture while trying to kill Virgil and Mel. This scares Wheatley who starts waking test subjects and spending them to find the portal gun. He wakes six test subjects (Doug Rattmann is possibly one of them) and assumes they die when he can no longer see them.
Mel beats AEGIS and Virgil helps her escapes to freedom. As AEGIS shuts down, it wakes Chell.
Wheatley knocks on Chell’s door
Portal 2! If you’ve read this far, you know the plot of Portal 2 and you don’t need me to summaries it
Aperture Tag: The Paint Gun Testing Initiative; Nigel – a personality core designed by GLaDOS – gets a test subject to test with a Paint Gun. The Paint Gun shoots repulsion and propulsion gel. The test subject tests and does maintenance by deactivating the Aperture Laboratories Stability Stable Energy Reactor (ALSSER).
Meet the Cores; various Aperture cores are doing their own thing around the facility. Aperture seem to be falling apart again
Edit: Since the multiverse is a thing in Portal canon, anything that doesn’t fit properly can be treated as if it happens in another universe. VALVe has said that Aperture Desk Job can be treated like an AU but might also become fully canon at some point.
There’s a good chance that The Underground is set after Portal 2 rather than between the main games. This means that GLaDOS and the Mainframe could conceivably have a showdown at some point which would be fun to see (I might write a fanfic about this at some point).
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