Valve: Two-Month Portal 2 Delay Is Company's 'Shortest Ever'

Valve today announced that the highly anticipated first-person action puzzler title Portal 2 was receiving "the shortest delay in Valve's proud tradition of delays," pushing back two months to the week of April 18, 2011. Noting that the original Portal received numerous accolades despite missing its original shipping target, Valve said the shorter-than-ever delay for the sequel represents a potentially disastrous "approaching convergence of Valve Time and Real Time." Last June, Valve delayed the game, due out on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC/Mac, from a late 2010 to an early 2011 target because "making games is hard," according to the company. Looking at delays for recent Valve titles, though the original Left 4 Dead was delayed a few times before its late 2008 release, Left 4 Dead 2 actually made the original November 17, 2009 release date first announced at that year's E3. In the more distant past, a delay of Half-Life 2 from 2003 to 2004 was attributed by Valve to theft of the game's source code by hackers. [UPDATE: ShackNews reports that the game will hit stores on April 20 in North America and Australia and April 22 in Europe.]