Wheatley (Portal)

Wheatley
Portal character
Wheatley, as he appears in Portal 2.
First game	Portal 2 (2011)
Created by	Erik Wolpaw
Designed by	Michael Spinx Jesse Brandt
Voiced by	Stephen Merchant Richard Lord (pre-release placeholder)

Wheatley is a fictional artificial intelligence from the Portal franchise first introduced in the 2011 video game Portal 2. He is voiced by British comedian Stephen Merchant, and created in part by Portal 2's designer Erik Wolpaw.

In the Portal narrative, Wheatley is one of several spherical "personality cores" developed to restrain GLaDOS, the main artificial intelligence that operates the Aperture Science facility, from becoming rampant, though Wheatley is later revealed to have been built to act as an intelligence dampener towards GLaDOS. Initially serving as a comedic foil to the player-character Chell during the first half of Portal 2, Wheatley becomes the main antagonist of the second half as he takes GLaDOS' place and wreaks havoc on the facility before Chell and GLaDOS stop him. In addition to Portal 2, Wheatley has appeared in Team Fortress 2 and Lego Dimensions.

Since his appearance in Portal 2, Wheatley has received overwhelmingly positive reception from critics. Merchant has been praised for his portrayal by critics who cited his fast-talking dialogue. Wheatley has also been described as a contrast to GLaDOS' "slower-speaking and more deliberate" personality.

Wheatley was first revealed in an ARG released by Valve Corporation, the developer of the Portal series, in a screenshot of Portal 2 before its release, showing the player-character Chell holding him. Wheatley came from combining several ideas from multiple "personality cores" that the player would meet throughout the game. The idea was removed as it supposedly made the game feel too cluttered and the player never got to really learn about the multiple robots, so several were combined into the character of Wheatley. Wheatley was designed with the purpose of making a character who "you’d be seeing a lot". He added that Wheatley served as an "offset" of GLaDOS; while her voice is "slower-speaking and more deliberate", Wheatley is a "frantic person", which he says is performed well by Merchant due to being able to relay information quickly in his speech.