What is Thinking With Portals?

It's a Portal-themed catchphrase, usually written as 'Now you're thinking with portals,' used to caption Photoshopped images or fan art imagining how a portal gun could solve everyday problems.

Where did Thinking With Portals come from?

The line is spoken by the AI character GLaDOS at the end of Valve's 2006 teaser trailer for Portal, which shipped as a game in October 2007.

What does Thinking With Portals mean?

It's a Portal-flavored stand-in for 'thinking outside the box,' used when someone finds an unconventional solution, often involving absurd uses of two linked portals.

How do you use Thinking With Portals?

Pair the phrase with an edited image showing a creative or ridiculous use of two portals, or drop it as a text reply when someone proposes a clever workaround.

Is Thinking With Portals still popular?

It's a classic late-2000s gaming catchphrase that stuck around in Portal fan communities and forums for years after launch, with thousands of YouTube videos using the title by 2012.

Thinking With Portals

2007catchphraseclassic

Published October 2, 2026

Thinking With Portals, also known as Now You're Thinking With Portals, is a catchphrase pulled from GLaDOS's dialogue in the 2006 teaser for Valve's Portal. Beginning in late 2007, fans paired the line with Photoshopped images and fan art showing absurd real-world uses for portal technology, spawning one of the most enduring gaming catchphrases of the late 2000s.

catchphrase memes gaming late 2000s memes photoshop memes something awful memes

Overview

Thinking With Portals, also known as Now You're Thinking With Portals, is a gaming catchphrase lifted from GLaDOS's closing line in the 2006 Portal teaser trailer1. Online, it works as a Portal-themed stand-in for the idiom thinking outside the box, slapped onto Photoshopped images, fan art, and optical illusions that imagine how the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device could rewrite everyday physics3.

The format is loose. Edits typically show two portals placed on walls, floors, or ceilings to produce an infinite loop, a shortcut, or a very bad idea, with the catchphrase delivered as a punchline. Early examples pulled from Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday included portals used to peek into locker rooms, dodge traffic, or create perpetual-motion slides2. Unedited photos of real-world optical illusions sometimes get captioned the same way to suggest a portal is doing the work3.

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Origin & Background

Platform

Valve Portal teaser (source) / Something Awful & Penny Arcade (viral spread)

Creator

Valve; meme format creators unknown

Date

2007

The phrase comes from Valve's single-player puzzle game Portal, which built its puzzles around a handheld gun that opens linked portals on flat surfaces and preserves momentum between them3. Valve introduced the line Now you're thinking with portals at the end of the game's 2006 teaser trailer, spoken by the AI character GLaDOS1.

The game shipped in October 2007 as part of The Orange Box, and the catchphrase quickly jumped into fan use. The Portal community site ThinkingWithPortals.com registered its domain on October 3rd, 2007, giving the phrase its first dedicated online home3.

How It Spread

Nine days after ThinkingWithPortals.com went live, Penny Arcade published an October 12th, 2007 strip in which Gabe used a portal pair to ride a slide forever, one of the earliest widely circulated riffs on the concept3. A week later, on October 19th, Something Awful ran a Photoshop Phriday titled Thinking With Portals, collecting user edits that imagined portals being used for mischief, shortcuts, and infinite-energy gags3.

Fan art followed through late 2007, including a papercraft piece and a Lego build documented by The Brothers Brick3. Over the next several years, the phrase surfaced in forum threads on Newgrounds, Game Informer, and World of Warcraft fan site Wowhead, plus image aggregators like Halolz, lolBlog, and The Inquisitr3. Valve nodded to the fandom in early 2011 by registering ThinkWithPortals.com as the official site for Portal 23.

By July 2012, searching for thinking with portals on YouTube returned more than 2,000 videos using the phrase as a title, a mix of gameplay clips, fan edits, and tutorials3. The catchphrase stuck around as a shorthand across Reddit, Tumblr, and Memebase well after the Portal series itself went quiet3.

Timeline

2006

Valve releases the Portal teaser trailer, which ends with GLaDOS saying 'Now you're thinking with portals'[1].

2007-10

Portal ships inside The Orange Box, bringing the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device to players[3].

2007-10-03

The fan site ThinkingWithPortals.com registers its domain, the first dedicated online use of the phrase[3].

2007-10-12

Penny Arcade publishes a strip showing Gabe exploiting portals to ride a slide forever[2].

2007-10-19

Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday Thinking With Portals compiles user edits imagining real-world portal uses[3].

2007-12-24

The Brothers Brick posts a Lego build riffing on the Thinking With Portals theme[3].

2011

Valve registers ThinkWithPortals.com as the official site for Portal 2[3].

2012-07

YouTube returns more than 2,000 videos titled 'thinking with portals'[3].

How to Use This Meme

Common convention is to pair the line with a Photoshopped image showing an improbable use of two linked portals, often one entry and one exit placed to form a loop or exploit gravity. It also works as a text-only reply when someone describes an unconventional solution to a problem, essentially a Portal-flavored way to say nice lateral thinking3.