The phrase the cake is a lie had it's origins on one of the *chans. It started in the lolicon image board also called "/cake/" or "Delicious Cake" (Lolicon being drawn pornography depicting small children doing sexual favors.) On certain chans (Which will go unnamed) the /cake/ board shows picture of real small children instead of drawn. similar to their /jb/ or jailbait boards. Some of these picture can be found with a tag on them saying "Open with winrar". When you do this these certain picture open text documents with links or bat info that leads to child porn or "CP". when people would open these in winrar most of the time they would be linked to such a website as Goatse or tubgirl. The receiver of "CP" would then return to the original thread and tag it with the phrase "The cake is a lie" cake being Child Porn. This phrase is often mistaken for portal where at the end you are rewarded with cake promised throughout the game only to have it taken away. But that would leave incorrect. The meaning of this phrase was lost some time ago and was only brought back when portal was introduced and it fit so well.

Roughly translates to "your promised reward is merely a fictitious motivator". Popularized by the game "Portal" (found on Half-Life 2's "Orange Box" game release for PC, X-Box 360, and PS3). During the game, an electronic voice encourages you to solve intricate puzzles using cake as a motivating perk. When you have "broken out" of the game's initial testing phase (from threat of death), you find scrawls on walls of the innards of the testing center warning you that "the cake is a lie".

Implies that a promised reward for one's work is false, with the one proffering the reward never intending to give it in the first place, possibly because the reward never even existed (see also: "there is no spoon"). This phrase can be used to express grief or frustration regarding any situation where there is an imbalance between effort and reward. This phrase was popularized by the game "Portal" by Valve Software Corporation.

During the game, GlaDOS, an artificially intelligent operating system and the game's passive-aggressive guide, uses the reward of cake as a motivating factor in an attempt to manipulate the player. It is first mentioned during the "impossible puzzle room", where she urges the player to "quit now and cake will be served immediately". In a later stage, the player can access a "hidden" area of the testing chamber to find a previous test participant had scrawled "The cake is a lie!" among other warning messages. Cake continues to remain the promised reward for completing the test and/or obeying GlaDOS, particularly in the final stages of the game. Finally, in the ending song, GlaDOS cheerfully sings about how "there's no sense crying over every mistake, you just keep on trying 'till you run out of cake."

In the game, cake serves as a carefully calculated motivational device, but there are suggestions that it also serves as an essence of humanity--the ability to eat cake, taste it, and experience emotional pleasure from it--which a computer ...

expression used when something great has been promised from a third party but it ultimately is not so.

a phrase meaning something to the effect of "you know that thing you where promised to be rewarded after you completed this task? well, it doesn't exist". could also be described as being trolled. the term was coined by the video game Portal in which your player would navigate through a labyrinth of tests while being driven to continue by the promise of cake. towards the end of the game, i becomes clear that there is in fact no cake and your efforts where in vain.

When they say there is cake, but there is an alternate motive that usually ends in ones humiliation/demise.

When a transsexual tricks a strait male into thinking he's a girl in bed.

A joke that has gone on for far too f*cking long.