1940s#

194?#

• Cave Johnson creates Aperture Fixtures, a company that manufactures shower curtains

1943#

• Cave Johnson receives the Shower Curtain Salesman award

1944#

• Using the profits from Aperture Fixtures, Cave Johnson purchases a salt mine in Upper Michigan

1947#

• Aperture Fixtures is renamed to Aperture Science Innovators

• Aperture Science Innovators receives an award for “Best New Science Company”

1949#

• Aperture Science Innovators comes second in the Top 100 Applied Science Companies, just behind Black Mesa, marking the start of a rivalry between the two companies

1950s#

1952#

• Construction begins of the new Aperture Science facility inside the salt mine. Instead of starting building at the top of the mine and continuing down, they decided to start at the bottom of the mine (over 4km below the surface) and build up. They planned to build 9 test shafts, each of which containing “Enrichment Spheres”: large asbestos spheres in which scientific tests would be conducted.

1953#

• Test shaft 09 is completed and testing for the “repulsion gel” begins. At this point, Aperture is so rich that they pay astronauts, war heroes, and Olympic athletes to participate in the testing. Unfortunately, the repulsion gel is very dangerous if it comes in contact with human skin, which led to many injuries.

• During this time, the portal technology was also discovered, which was quickly integrated into the tests.

• The repulsion gel testing was the most ethical testing Aperture conducted at this point, with some of the other testing including: injecting test subjects with praying mantis DNA, using jet engines to reduce the amount of water inside test subjects, using lasers to turn blood into gasoline, and more.

1955#

• Aperture Science receives the Spirit of Idaho award for promoting potato science

1956#

• Aperture signs a contract with the US Military to manufacture shower curtains for them

1958#

• Using the money from the military contract, Aperture builds two more enrichment spheres
• Up to 1,000 tests are were being performed every day

1960s#

1961#

• Due to the danger of some of the tests being run by Aperture, test shaft 09 was sealed because of “cosmic ray spallation elements” along with lots of other test chambers.

1968#

• Aperture Science goes bankrupt because of their reckless spending and because of the 1968 Senate Hearings on missing astronauts.

1970s#

1971#

• Using the very limited money the company still had, several more enrichment spheres were constructed to test the Repulsion Gel
• The “Borealis” ship was also created which contained Aperture’s most impressive and advanced teleportation technology, this ship disappeared along with part of the dock for an unknown reason.
• Because they could no longer afford to hire astronauts, war heroes, and Olympic athletes to do the test, they instead started paying homeless people $60 to potentially put their lives at risk completing the (still very dangerous) tests.

1976#

• Test subjects can now earn an extra $60 if they allow Aperture scientists to take them apart, put some “science stuff” in them, and put them back together.
• Because Aperture knew what they were doing was highly illegal, there were signs in the offices instructing employees to notify their supervisors if they saw any government officials, journalists, and more.

1980s#

1981#

• Aperture could now no longer even afford to hire homeless people to do their tests, instead resorting to forcing their own employees to participate in testing, with plans to eventually replace human testing entirely with robots.

1982#

• Aperture spent $70 on moon rocks to create “Conversion Gel”, which when applied to a surface, would allow portals to be placed on it. Unfortunately, these moon rocks were extremely toxic and Cave Johnson became fatally ill. Testing began on the Conversion Gel to see if going through portals could get the poison out of his blood. Since he knew that he was probably going to die, he instructed his engineers to create a way of uploading a brain into a computer, and if they were able to, use it on him.
• If he died before the scientists were able to put him in a computer, they were told to force his assistant, Caroline, to be put in the computer instead.

198?#

• Cave Johnson dies of moon rock poisioning.
• The older areas of Aperture are sealed off and used as the foundation for a new, much larger facility.
• Testing is changed to focus more on portals than gel.

1986#

• Development of the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System (GLaDOS), the system designed to allow a human brain to be uploaded to a computer, begins. They plan to use this system to speed up testing.

1990s#

1996#

• Development beings of the “Genetic Lifeform” part of GLaDOS.
• The “Red Phone Plan” is created, in which an employee must sit by a red phone while GLaDOS is on and use it if she goes rogue.

1998#

• Caroline is forcefully uploaded into GLaDOS, it is unknown what happened to Caroline after this, but it is believed that she died during the process.
• GLaDOS is turned on for the first time, and instantly tries to lockdown the facility and kill everyone inside, she is quickly turned off before any damage could be done.
• The Morality Core is invented, to prevent GLaDOS from trying to kill everyone again.

2000s#

20??#

• GLaDOS pretends to have lost all interest in killing, and asks for some neurotoxin to perform an experiment on bring-your-daughter-to-work-day. The scientists grant this request, believing that GLaDOS really only wanted to do science.
• On bring-your-daughter-to-work-day, GLaDOS locks down the facility, and kills almost everyone inside using the neurotoxin.
• The surviving employees are forced to endlessly perform tests, which leads to most of them dying in the process.
• The only employee who survived, Doug Rattman, manages to escape the testing cycle and updates the list of test subjects to move someone named Chell to the top of the list, Chell was rejected for testing previously for being too stubborn and never giving up.

• After running out of employees to test on, GLaDOS gets the first test subject out of cryogenic storage to continue testing, this test subject being Chell, and the first Portal game begins.
• Chell completes the first 18 tests, but in the 19th test, GLaDOS attempts to kill Chell by using a pit of fire. Chell escapes this trap and starts making her way through the maintenance corridors and offices of Aperture. After dodging GLaDOS’s traps, she makes it to GLaDOS’s chamber and the two start fighting, GLaDOS uses rocket turrets to try and kill Chell, but Chell uses her portal gun to return these rockets to GLaDOS, knocking “Personality Cores” off of her, then destroying them. After destroying all 4 cores, GLaDOS explodes and Chell is pulled up to the surface by the explosion. Chell then gets dragged back into the Aperture facility by a Party Escort Bot, who thanks her for “assuming the party escort submission position”. She is then placed into a long term relaxation vault, but due to the explosion of GLaDOS, the life support in all of the relaxation vaults had lost power.
• Doug Rattman, who had survived GLaDOS’s attacks by hiding in the walls of test chambers, escapes Aperture and notices Chell being taken back inside and runs after her. After realising that all the relaxation vaults had lost power, he patches Chell’s vault into the reserve power grid, even though there would be no wake up date. Doug then goes to sleep inside a vault, and it is unknown what happened to him after this.

Portal 2 era (approx. 52,000)#

52,???#

• Chell is woken up after the reserve power runs out, and meets a personality core named Wheatley who starts to help her escape the dilapidated facility. They make their way to the main breaker room to look for an escape pod, and Wheatley accidentally reactivates GLaDOS, who forces Chell to start testing again.
• After completing some of GLaDOS’s tests, Wheatley helps Chell break out of the test chambers and they sabotage the turret production line and neurotoxin. They then find their way back to GLaDOS’s chamber and start a core transfer, which puts Wheatley in charge of the entire facility.
• It is then revealed that Wheatley was designed to be as stupid as possible to try and limit GLaDOS’s intelligence, he then get’s angry and puts GLaDOS in a potato battery and repeatedly punches the lift that Chell and GLaDOS are in into a pit, which leads them to the sealed off areas of old Aperture.
• Chell starts making her way back up to the modern areas of Aperture by completing the old portal gun and gel tests. On her way, she learns the history of Aperture Science, and finds GLaDOS, who was taken by a bird and put into its nest. She takes GLaDOS with her and continues her journey. She then discovers more of Aperture’s history and finds out what happened to Cave Johnson.
• Once Chell and GLaDOS get back to the modern Aperture facility, they reunite with Wheatley and realise that if GLaDOS doesn’t get back in charge soon, the nuclear reactor powering the facility will explode because Wheatley doesn’t know how to control it.
• Chell completes some of Wheatley’s new tests, and eventually falls for a trap that he set in a test chamber, Wheatley then tries to kill them after he discovers two robots built for testing and no longer needs Chell. She escapes this trap before he can kill her and journeys through the facility towards Wheatley’s “lair”. Chell and GLaDOS then confront Wheatley who throws bombs at Chell, who uses portals to launch them back at him, then attaching corrupted cores to him to try and start another core transfer. Wheatley objects to the core transfer, which leads to Chell having to press the “Stalemate Resolution Button”, which, unknowingly to her, Wheatley had trapped with bombs. The explosion launches her away from the button and onto the floor. Part of the ceiling collapses to reveal the moon. She shoots a portal onto the moon and Wheatley and Chell get pulled through to the Moon. GLaDOS regains control of the facility and pulls Chell back through the portal to Earth while Wheatley gets flung into space.
• GLaDOS thanks Chell for helping her regain control and accepts the fact that she won’t be able to kill her, and instead, releases her from Aperture and lets her return to the surface.