A few days ago news emerged of an amazing real life replica of the cute and deadly AI-imbued turrets from Valve’s original Portal, created by cinematic animator and apparent prop master Ryan Palser.

The project to create such a replica was meticulous indeed, and Palser has documented the entire process, from start to finish, on his profile page at Flickr with images and text descriptions of every step.

Apparently, only two of these Portal Turret replicas have been made, and Epic Games’ Creative Director Cliff Bleszinski put in an order for one of them…

… and he very recently received it in the mail.

From a Twitter post by Bleszinski:

“Portal turret arrived! I haven’t been this excited since I got my masterpiece Optimus Prime. Pics soon.”

Which was followed up by two other posts:

“Only 2 were made and I have one guarding my home.”

“And I’m not going to tell you how much it was. Let’s just say it wasn’t 60$. :o”

Bleszinski had previously received a portion of the Portal Turret, but only in parts:

You can see the real-life Portal Turret in action thanks to a video that Palser recorded, and check out a few more images of the life-sized, 38-inch spectacular replica that features speech and “full motion sensing audio as well as a special button to play the ever classy Portal theme song:”

Source: Cliff Bleszinski on Twitter