The cake is a lie
“The cake is a lie”
2007·Early YouTube·funny
A warning scrawled on the walls of the video game Portal, used for any promised reward that will never come.
At a glanceThe facts
- Spread in
- 2007
- Began as
- A commercial release
- Where it started
- commercial-release
- Format
- Phrase
- Taken from
- Portal, released in 2007
- Made by
- The game’s writers, Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek
- What it said
- “The cake is a lie”
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
In Portal, the player is repeatedly promised cake for completing tests. Behind the walls, in rooms the game does not require you to find, a previous test subject has scrawled warnings — among them, that the cake is a lie. Valve's designers intended it as a small reward for looking, and expected almost nobody to notice.
It became the shorthand for any promised reward that is not coming — a job, a bonus, a policy — used constantly by people who have never played the game. It is one of the clearest cases of a piece of environmental detail in a work of fiction outgrowing the work, and Valve's own designers have described being bemused by it.
By the time Portal 2 arrived in 2011 the line had been so thoroughly worn out that its writers deliberately refused to use it again, which is an unusual position for a studio to take about its own most famous line. The phrase remains in circulation nearly twenty years on.
Why it is here: copied, redrawn and reused until the original stopped mattering · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast
This was released commercially before the internet carried it. Originally published on commercial-release.
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This was released commercially before the internet carried it. Originally published on commercial-release.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
More from 2007You were there
More from early YouTubeMore of the archive
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things