Portal 2’s director Josh Weier has spoken more about the game’s cut content and given background information on why features were cut or how they came to be.
The team that worked on Valve’s first-person puzzle adventure masterpiece have openly talked about cut content in the past. At the Games Developer Conference in 2012, writers Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek talked about features that were cut such as Garfield references, multiple endings, and Wheatley’s early demise. Later that year at PAX Prime, Wolpaw also revealed Valve had planned to have protagonist Chell marry a turret during the game.
10 years on, speaking to Did You Know Gaming, Josh Weier has weighed in with his own insight on why these bits were cut and where they stemmed from during development.
In the co-op campaign, GLaDOS would attempt to rewrite a Garfield spoof called Dorfeldt. According to Weier, “[the writers] hated Garfield”, and so they gladly took any opportunities to poke fun at the comic strip. Although Weier was the game’s director and project lead, he was more involved in development of the game’s solo campaign. He recalled that Dorfeldt would have appeared early in the co-op but never saw a “concrete” version of it.