the cake is a lie

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Spoiler alert … for an 11-year-old video game. You have been warned.

The cake is a lie is a memetic phrase originating from the 2007 video game, Portal. In the game, the player character, Chell, is tasked with testing out an experimental gun that creates portals. Chell is given orders by an AI named GLaDOS. GLaDOS starts out helpful and supportive, even promising Chell that she will receive cake at the end of the tests.

As the game goes on, GLaDOS becomes more mean-spirited and spiteful, insulting Chell as an orphan who has no friends. The tests also become increasingly dangerous, involving things like traversing acid. Once all of the tests are completed, GLaDOS congratulates the player and supposedly begins preparations for a party with the promised cake. But in reality, GLaDOS attempts to kill Chell by lowering her into a furnace. Chell escapes and, along the way, finds graffiti from past test subjects that GLaDOS had killed. Among them, the phrase the cake is a lie is madly scrawled on the walls.

After the release of the game, the cake is a lie became a popular catchphrase shared among Portal players. Via gaming forums, the phrase spread virally and took on a new sense of a false promise, trap, or delusion. The cake is a lie was shared so often and used in so many memes that it was already appearing on T-Shirts and alluded to in other video games not even a year after Portal’s release.

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By 2010, the cake is a lie meme had been so widely used that Portal head writer Erik Wolpaw said he would make no reference to it in his sequel, Portal 2, because he was so tired of it. So, too, was the contemporary internet, where the cake is a lie became considered an unhip “dead meme,” with anyone using it unironically perceived as out-of-touch with internet culture.