Partly because I just completed portal for the second time, and partly because I’ve always wondered - here’s how you extract the end credits music (which is both really well written, and also sums up the whole game.) WARNING - If you haven’t completed the game, don’t extract the portal music, as it contains spoilers for the game.. Of course, you can use the same program to extract other music from Half Life 2 & Episode 1/2.

The first thing you need is a crafty download - the program gcfscape, available [here] is the answer. It allows you to extract .gcf files in Half Life 2, which are like zip files, to their component parts. For the portal music, navigate to & open the file “portal content.gcf” which can be found in your “Valve” installation folder in “Steam\SteamApps\”. When opened, navigate within the file to “portal\sounds\music” and extract the file “portal_still_alive.mp3″ by right-clicking it. You can also get the Half Life 2 songs from “Steam\SteamApps\source sounds.gcf”