 The writers originally conceived several premature joke game endings if the player performed certain actions , but these required too much development effort for little payback and were scrapped . One of these joke endings was triggered by shooting a portal onto the moon 's surface , after which the player 's character would die from asphyxiation over a closing song , but the idea of creating a portal on the moon was incorporated into the game 's final ending . The writers planned that Chell would say a single word during the ending , but this was not considered funny enough . In an early version of the script , Chell finds a lost " tribe " of turrets looking for their leader , a huge " Animal King " turret which can be seen in in @-@ game videos of the retail product . As a reward , the Animal King would have married Chell to a turret , which would have followed Chell around the game without visible movement . The cooperative campaign was planned to feature a more detailed storyline , in which GLaDOS would send two robots to discover human artifacts , such as a comic based on a pastiche of Garfield . The writers hoped to use this idea to make the robots human @-@ like for testing purposes , but recognized that unlike the captive audience of the single @-@ player campaign , the two players in cooperative mode may simply talk over the story , and thus the story was condensed into very basic elements . 
