"About The Cake is a Lie is a catchphrase popularized by the game Portal, and is often used to convey the message that a promised gift is being used to motivate without any intent of delivering. (See also: The Cake is a Spy, Weighted Companion Cube, Still Alive, Get The Cake) Origin In Portal you are required to do numerous tasks in a research facility guided by a computer named GlaDOS, who repeatedly mentions that following the experiment, there will be cake. As the game progresses, the player finds messages written on the walls as warnings from past test subjects. One message scrawled on the walls in later levels reads “the cake is a lie. the cake is a lie. the cake is a lie. the cake is a lie”: In addition, the ending credits sequence that follows the game features a song called, “Still Alive” which mentions the cake. From Reference to Idiom After the games release, “the cake is a lie” was widely popular between Portal players, but soon it spread to forums and blogs where the phrase began to take on a new meaning outside of the context of the game. People were using the phrase, “The cake is a lie”, on forums as an idiom meaning, “You are chasing after an empty, unattainable goal.” Urban Dictionary This usage is further illustrated in the top-voted UrbanDictionary definition for “The Cake Is a Lie.”[1] Roughly translates to “your promised reward is merely a fictitious motivator”. Popularized by the game “Portal” (found on Half-Life 2’s “Orange Box” game release for PC, X-Box 360, and PS3). During the game, an electronic voice encourages you to solve intricate puzzles using cake as a motivating perk. When you have “broken out” of the game’s initial testing phase (from threat of death), you find scrawls on walls of the innards of the testing center warning you that “the cake is a lie”. Employee #1: Yo, Dave, manager says we will probably get a promotion if we meet the sales expectations for this quarter. Employee #2: Yeah, so, don’t get your hopes up on that one, Ed. The cake is a lie. Employee #1: Really, aw crap."
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 03:18:54 +0000
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