Portal is about to become more portable

Valve is bringing one of the most popular PC games in recent history to Nvidia’s young handheld console.

Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive of graphics hardware company Nvidia, announced today that PC gaming giant Valve is bringing its beloved first-person puzzle game Portal to Nvidia’s Shield. He delivered the news at the end of his keynote speech for this year’s GPU Technology Conference.

“Nvidia has created a very powerful and unique device with Shield,” said Valve’s director of marketing Doug Lombardi in a public statement. “Our companies have a strong history working together, and we’re looking forward to Portal’s arrival on Shield.”

Nvidia’s public relations manager Jordan Dodge told GamesBeat, “Shield fans will get the same great gameplay and visual effects as PC gamers. While there may not be anything unique, it will be the full version of the game without anything stripped out.”

The Shield is Nvidia’s first foray into the handheld console market. It’s priced at $200, and it is larger than most other video game handhelds, but it has the ability to remotely stream PC game collections. It runs on the Android operating system.

Valve released Portal in 2007 for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. Since then, it’s added OS X and Linux to its list of platforms. Shield will be the first portable platform capable of playing it.

The game surprised the world with its creative physics-based puzzles and quirky storytelling, and it went on to garner mass acclaim, including Game of the Year, Innovation Award, and Best Game Design at 2008’s Game Developers Conference. By the time its sequel released in 2011, the original had already sold 4 million copies.

Huang called Portal “one of the greatest games of all time.” He added, “this is a game that every child should play … we’re so excited that Valve has finally ported their application, Portal, to Shield.”