There’s been a couple of times when we spotted references towards EP3 content within another Valve game’s content. In fact, the Combine OverWiki has an entire article on the subject . It hasn’t happened in a while, though. It was getting a bit dull – exploring the depths of game folders in hopes of finding… whatever, can be surprisingly enjoyable. And it turns out it’s happening again!

In a forum thread posted on the Episode Two Steam Forums, forum user Ded tells us how he uncovered several .vcd choreography files labelled “magnuss” in Portal 2’s VPK cache, which can be found in the game’s main directory (open “pak01_dir.vpk”, then head over to the “scenes” folder). The files themselves are named:

magnuss_get_going.vcd

magnuss_idle.vcd

magnuss_nopoint.vcd

magnuss_shakehead.vcd

magnuss_wave.vcd

A quick inspection of the files in the Source SDK’s Faceposer tool will reveal that the choreography actor is named “magnusson”, and this actor’s model appears to be “magnusson.mdl”. The label, “magnuss”, differs from Episode Two’s label for Magnusson’s choreography files, which was simply “mag” – this pretty much confirms we’re dealing with new choreography, created after Episode Two’s release. In fact, these files cannot be found inside Episode Two.

DasFreeman95 cooked up a little video showing the choreography in use on Magnusson himself:

Looks like this is taken from Episode Three’s intro sequence – “magnuss_wave” might simply be Magnusson waving Gordon and Alyx goodbye. “magnuss_nopoint” seems to be Magnusson in disagreement with someone – perhaps Alyx? As for “magnuss_get_going” – I would imagine that’s Magnusson telling Gordon to get going somewhere, in case he lingers in a certain area.

I’m pretty sure these were intentionally placed here. There’s no reason why Valve would inexplicably misplace files (that seem to work all too well on current versions of Source), for an unreleased, unannounced title. The way they seem to have been carefully selected also leads me to believe this is an intentional easter egg of sorts, left for any fans with a propensity for data mining.

Let’s hope the day comes when we get to see Magnusson’s cool moves, without having to go digging through game caches.