I wanted to end things on a high note, so I looked at more recent unofficial releases. There’s a small homebrew community, such as the N64 Brew group, making some fun little minigames in jam sessions, plus a few reproduction cartridge releases of games that aren’t really designed for the N64. But it was this partial port of Portal that interested me the most, as it really shows what the N64 can do.

This version of Portal works on a real N64. There are some graphical settings relating to how deep portals can go (essentially, how many times portals can repeat until you get a texture, instead of seeing more rooms), so you can stretch your console to the limit, but it’s an amazingly built conversion. Everything works and feels how it should – the physics and momentum is great, and placing, looking, and going through portals is wonderful. It even has the full dialogue from GLaDOS.

Unfortunately, only the start of the game is here, and it ends shortly after getting the full portal gun (so you can at least play with placing both portals yourself). Valve messaged the developer and suggested they stop, because of Nintendo’s N64 libraries being involved in the coding, so the project was cancelled. Still, even this early version is a wonderful example of what the N64 hardware was capable of.​​​​​​

Great

Remake or remaster?

Well, we have the original Portal. A little spruce up would be nice, though (keeping the original style, not like the RTX version).

Official Ways to get the game

This fan project is no longer available officially due to a takedown notice from Valve. The original Portal is available on Steam, Xbox Series (Portal: Still Alive via Backwards Compatibility), and Portal: Companion Collection on Switch.