Cool Gate

The coolest Cool Gate there is. It even spins, for added coolness... 'Cause it's cool!!

Stargate,
It’s a great big world,
With a great big swirl that you step inside to another world.

We’re talking Stargate,
It’s a crazy trip,
You can go quite far and you don’t need a car or even a ship.

— Joe Mallozzi, Paul Mullie, and Peter DeLuise singing the lyrics they invented for the Stargate SG-1 intro music

First you're here. Walk through this here gate—possibly only when the moon is gibbous, or you have yellow violets in your left hand, possibly only with the Applied Phlebotinum and Techno Babble of quantum mechanics or folding space-time or maybe even magic—and then you are... there.

Cool, ain't it?

Unlike Cool Car, Cool Boat, etc., this is not about distinctly cool gates. Gates tend to be rare enough that they are all cool. Even when they interconnect into a Portal Network.

This is a common way of getting to Magical Land. After all, even the coolest of airplanes and boats have a little trouble with the travel there; subtropes include Portal Pool, Portal Door, and Portal Picture.

It's also common in Science Fiction.

Be warned that there is no guarantee of pleasantness or even familiar physics on the other side. Alien Geometries are not unknown.

After a time, Portal Slam may result, or it may close when in use.

Since there's no real-world analog to teleportation, writers can apply any variety of bizarre special effects to the act of being transported without hurting Willing Suspension of Disbelief. On the other hand, they can also appear relentlessly mundane—perhaps a simple arched doorway in a wall of crumbling stone—until you look or step through them, and notice the discrepancy.

Note that Thinking Up Portals is the trope for characters who can create holes in reality to transport themselves without crossing the intervening distances. This is a kind of Teleportation with Drawbacks due to placing restrictions on an entrance or exit. It may overlap Our Wormholes Are Different.

Has nothing to do with media or political scandals being referred to with a reference to "Watergate" or with a particular brand of toothpaste.

You go in here...

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Examples:

Advertising

• Cats in elaborate Friskies catfood commercials step through portals into a world of tasty CGI fish, chickens, and other cat treats.

Anime and Manga

• Ah! My Goddess:
  • In one of the later manga volumes, we get to meet the gate between Earth and Heaven, and she's a kinda cute creepy girl. One that wants to have some fun and won't open for anyone till she's had some. Eventually, Keiichi is dragooned into opening her, with a (big) key.
  • In the movie, there is also a magic gate that only true lovers could pass through and still remain together. Guess what happened.
• Ayakashi Triangle:
  • The shrine Matsuri and Suzu have hung out at since they were children has a mihashira torii, a gateway with three pillars, creating three different gateways. It's important enough that the gate is the only feature in Suzu's Mental World, where it symbolizes the ayakashi medium's spirit being split into three pieces.
  • Uraomiko can only be accessed by walking through seven torii gates (regular two-pillars one) in a specific order.
• Bleach:
  • The Gates of Hell. When a Hollow who committed grave sins in life is cut down by a Shinigami, the Gates manifest nearby and open just wide enough for something to impale the Hollow in question and drag them inside.
    • The main antagonists of the fourth movie attempt to lure Ichigo to Hell by kidnapping Yuzu so that they can force him to use his Hollowfication to destroy the Gates of Hell, expecting that they will be able to escape permanently afterwards. After Ichigo defeats their leader, Kokuto reveals that destroying the Gates is pointless, as what really binds the sinners to Hell is the unbreakable chains embedded to them. When Ichigo ends up actually destroying the Gates after giving in to his Inner Hollow in the ensuing fight, the end result is that Hell's miasma begins leaking to the World of the Living, and the Gotei 13 scramble to contain the damage until the Gates repair themselves by the end of the movie.
  • The gate (that looked like a big sliding door) that Soul Reapers could create to travel from the world of the living to the Soul Society (Captain Kuchiki uses one early in the series to return himself, Rukia and Renji).
• The entrance to C's world is some sort of psychic stone wall in Code Geass.
• Digimon Adventure:
  • The gate in Myotismon's castle is used in reverse: it doesn't take you to Magical Land but from it. (In fact, it can take you to any dimension so long as you know how to properly arrange the cards.)
  • In Digimon Adventure 02, any computer with a D3 Digivice held up to it. (The old-school digivice used by the original team could only access the Digital World from certain computers at certain times. If the gate closes, you're out of luck. The new kids can come and go at will, though.)
• Fairy Tail: Happy's Heroic Adventure: In the form of a giant head that eats Happy and transports him to another world.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • The Gate of Truth, which features the Sephiroticum.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), the gate is based on a sculpture by Auguste Rodin.
• Naruto: Sakon/Ukon and Orochimaru can both summon a demonic version of the main gate to Kyoto to block attacks.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi has the Gateports to the Magic World. One of them is underneath The World Tree, another is Stonehenge.
• SD Gundam Force: The Zakurello Gate, a sentient dimensional doorway is used by the Dark Axis to travel between their world and Neotopia's. Entering the Gate is like flying into the jaws of some beast. Of course, it being self-aware has its own set of problems. Shute is able to trick the Gate into opening by impersonating Zapper Zaku, and when the Gundam Force use the Gate to leave Neotopia is Episode 27, the Zakos force it to change the destination mid-transport, stranding the Cool Ship in the Void Between Worlds. In the last episode, the Gate disappears to parts unknown altogether.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Johan reveals in Season 3 that Duel Monsters cards don't contain and release monsters, but are actually the gates monsters use to travel between their world and their master's.

Card Games

• The Yu-Gi-Oh! card game happens to have multiple takes on this, including 'Different Dimension Gate', 'Monster Gate', and even a card meant to restrict attacks, "The Dark Door", which takes the form of a gate (or at least a door out of a very freakish universe).
• Magic: The Gathering provides us with Door To Nothingness, a cool gate to a non-cool place.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Wonder Woman: Under Themyscira is a gate to Hades, at least in Post-Crisis continuity, in the Justice League cartoon and in Wonder Woman (Rebirth). Though just what dimension or pocket dimension Paradise Island/Themyscira is in has always been subject to the whims of the writers. The place has consitantly been host to and guardian of Doom's Doorway, a rift which leads to the outer realms of Hades and the Underworld, ever since the Post-Crisis Reboot.
  • JLA (1997) has Portal Gates at certain times that seemed to link the JLA moonbase to a few key locations. Not used very often (at least "on screen").
  • In the Star Wars comics, they introduce the Infinity Gates built by the Kwa using the technology of the Celestials. Apparently, there was a network that allowed instantaneous travel nearly anywhere in the galaxy. Oh and for added fun, they could be used as devastating superweapons, projecting Infinity Waves which destroyed all life and matter at the target and made hyperspace travel impossible in its vicinity.
  • Boom Tubes in the New Gods mythos. They can be summoned anywhere with a Mother Box computer, and are in general used by the Gods on a regular basis.
  • Dimensional portals show up quite frequently in Supergirl stories:
    • In Demon Spawn, villainous sorceress Nightflame opens a dimensional rift to travel from her universe to the physical world.
      Suddenly, it appears — hanging in mid-air... Here, on a street in San Francisco... Shimmering, crackling and growing... a crack, a rip in the very fabric of the universe! And out of it comes a figure... humanoid, yet huge... an Amazon... brandishing a fiery sword!
    • The Supergirl from Krypton (2004): Supergirl's rescue party use a mother box to reach Apokolips, and later Superman uses another to go from the Sun to the Wall Source.
    • In Supergirl (1972) issue #5 a villain uses a dimensional gate resembling a normal door to drag the Girl of Steel in another dimension.
    • In Good Looking Corpse, a group of villains use portals to find and harass heroes.
    • In the beginning of Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade's Grand Finale, a glowing space-time vortex opens in Linda and Lena's dorm, and an alternate Supergirl flies out of it.
    • In Strangers at the Heart's Core, a glowing, golden rift in the fabric of the reality lets Kryptonian villain Shyla Kor-Onn get out of the Phantom Zone and fly into the physical world.
    • In Escape from the Phantom Zone, the Tycho Eidolon device generates a dimensional portal shaped as a glowing energy sphere which drags everything surrounding it into the Phantom Zone.
  • Superman:
    • In Kryptonite Nevermore, Quarrm's life-forms slip in Earth through several translucent "holes" in the air.
    • In The Phantom Zone, Superman and Quex-Ul go through several dimensional portals during their journey: an energy wall surrounding the Phantom Zone, a sun which works as a gate when it is glowing yellow, a whirlpool, the flames of a hearth...
  • Worlds Finest 1941: In issue #198, Superman and Flash find a glowing, golden rift in the black void of space as fleeing from an exploding super-nova, fly into it and land on a strange world which orbits around a doughnut-shaped sun.
    • In Superman/Masters of the Universe crossover "From Eternia— With Death!", Kal-El runs into a strange storm cloud which his X-Ray Vision cannot pierce through. Suddenly, he is pulled into the cloud by some irresistible force, and thrown out into the parallel world of Eternia.
• Marvel Universe:
  • For a while the X-Men were the proud owners of the Siege Perilous (named for the Arthurian myth), a magical portal which shrunk down to handy portable size. Passing through it would reboot your life (and give you amnesia along the way).
  • There's a Shi'Ar Stargate at the edge of the solar system. Don't tell anyone, though, because using it can destabilize the Sun. The Shi'Ar also use smaller personal Gates.
  • The Fantastic Four withold the Forever Gate, a portal that takes anyone anywhere in space and time.
  • The Mighty Thor: In The Surtur Saga, capturing the warp-gate assembled by the Fire Demons at New York City became crucial for Asgardian and Earth forces in stopping the invasion of the Fire Demons, as it allows them to reach the Sahara Desert, where an even BIGGER warp-gate linking directly to Muspelheim is located and allows the endless Fire Demon hordes to pour forth.
• The Authority can call the Carrier for a Door to anywhere in the world, or back to the Carrier, and at least once to parallel universes.
• The Sandman (1989) has several magic gates. Each of the Endless has a gallery which they use to talk and visit each other's realms. In the real world, any labyrinth can be used as a gate to Destiny's realm. Destruction creates a gate (with an appropriate big explosion) that Orpheus uses to visit Death's realm. Dream's realm has an ornately carved big gate at the front which dreams pass through.
• Played for laughs a lot of times in Mortadelo y Filemón, as the way the two agents often go to the T. I. A. headquarters -and expect someone attempting the same after both have entered, just to fail miserably.- Examples include them entering into a traffic signal by opening it, into the Sun one lifting the other as if it was just a window, and entering into an open coffin, complete with a corpse, in a funeral parlour.
• This is a common form of transport in Astro City. Everything from Honor Guard's Portal Network to the gates they have to construct to reach other dimensions.
  • The back door of the Silver Adept's mansion magically opens to a rustic countryside in the Fields of Allatar.
  • Roy Virgil, a.k.a. the Astro-Naut, had one in his office that led to his Space Base over the Earth.

Fairy Tales

• In Franz Xaver von Schönwerth's "King Goldenlocks", a giant teaches Goldenlocks tells Goldenlocks to strike a certain rock with a club and then walk into the crack to reach the garden of paradise. The giant also warns him that he must go back quickly or the dimensional portal will close.

Fan Works

• Split Second (My Little Pony) has Death's wings as a portal to the afterlife.
• Sunsplit Saga: From Sunshipped, it's Implied, due to the source material, that Sunset Shimmer visits the human world just by walking into a horse statue, and ends up exiting through a magic mirror.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: As part of the two sets of Portal Networks:
  • Underworlder Portal installations, which connect to other ones, first seen in "Into the Portal," are described as:
    The portal reminded Ami of pictures of Stonehenge. Four arches, composed of two tall stone pillars with a horizontal crossbar on top, were arranged in such a way that they touched at the corners. The area inside the square they formed glowed with hazy images of faraway territories and emitted a warm orange light
  • At least one "hero gate network" exists, as said in "No Wonder Cure", and such gates are, as seen in "More Lessons":
    a structure that resembled a canopy tent, except that it was made of stone and rested on four thick, round pillars. Within the structure wavered a water-like surface, forming an upright oval that looked like a full-length mirror.
• In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/The Chronicles of Narnia crossover "The Lion, the Cat and the Turtles," after Leonardo travels through a random portal to Narnia in the New York sewers, his family, April and Klunk track down the now-elderly Susan in New York, where she is able to open a door to Narnia using a photograph of the wardrobe and invoking her status as a Queen of Narnia.
• A Crown of Stars: Several portals leading to other dimensions show up as soon as the first chapter when Daniel opens one inside Shinji and Asuka's tent to pick them up and take them to Avalon. During their stay in Avalon, both teenagers found out that magic and technology capable to create or build inter-dimensional gates or time doors are commomnplace. Also, bad things happen when a portal collapses, leaving the main characters cut off and stuck on other dimension.
  Asuka's rest did not last long undisturbed. Shinji was just rising from replacing his cello in its padded trunk when the sun rose in their tent.
  Shinji whirled around. "What?" He blinked his eyes repeatedly against the sudden blaze of gold. A perfect seven-foot circle of seeming daylight stood on the far side of the tent, filling the tent with noontime brightness. Shading his eyes with his hand allowed Shinji a slightly better look at it. Almost too bright to look at directly, it seemed for all the world like a floodlit pool stood on its side. Shinji had only a moment to stare in confusion when the light dimmed as a man stepped out of it. This did not diminish his puzzlement.
  "Pilot Ikari Shinji-san?" The man inquired in Japanese.
  "Third, what's th—-" Asuka blinked awake in her suddenly brightly lit sleeping bag, then bolted upright. "Who the hell are you?! What is that?"
  "Fräulein Pilot Asuka Langley Sohryu? I'm sorry to interrupt your rest, but this is the earliest I could arrive." Shinji still could hardly see the backlit figure, just a caped silhouette. The figure noted his squint. "Ah, my apologies for the brightness of the portal. Rather a large energy differential between here and home. Let me get that." He snapped his fingers and the glowing mini-sun shrank to a point and vanished. The near-daylight illumination dropped to just the solitary camp lantern hanging at the tent's entryway.
• With This Ring: One of Paul's notable contributions to raising Earth's general technology level is providing Atlantis with a sample Dolmen Gate and getting them to mass-produce it. The gates operate in pairs, and essentially tell the universe that they're the same object, so if you walk through one gate, you come out the other, with absolutely no fanfare, as if you were passing through an ordinary door frame. Under his direction, Cadbury's obtains a number of them to make distribution channels faster and cheaper — and then, in the aftermath of the Sheeda invasion, with many standard types of transport having been heavily damaged, various other companies approach them to ask about renting the gates out.

Films — Animation

• The BFG: In this version of the story, the titular Big Friendly Giant, whilst running through the sky, reaches Giant Country through some kind of swirling ethereal tunnel. In Giant Country, a hollow mountain houses a towering column of light, jumping into which leads to Dream Country.
• Howl's Moving Castle: The door leading out of the castle has multiple selectable destinations.
• In the Monsters, Inc. movies, when activated, the doors connect the monster's world to children's bedrooms throughout the human world. When inactive, they are ordinary doors connecting the bedrooms to closets, etc. That is why the monster is never there when your parents open the door to check.
• In Treasure Planet, it turns out this is how Flint managed to plunder so many planets.

Films — Live-Action

• Blade Runner: The Tannhäuser Gate was merely mentioned once, and its function not even described, but Memetic Mutation has made it a dimensional gate nonetheless.
• Godmothered: Eleanor opens one of these to get to the real world. The portal shimmers and is very large, and its edge is made of water.
• In The Neverending Story, Atreyu passes through a mirror that serves this purpose.
• There are nine gates in the title sequence of Polanski's The Ninth Gate, made all the more portentous by Wojciech Kilar's score.
• Phantasm: The gate in the mausoleum consisted of two metal poles stuck in the floor. Anything that passed through them went to the planet which the Tall Man came from.
• Poltergeist: The ghosts who are haunting the house creates a gate in the children's closet leading to the other side: another gate in the ceiling of the living room leads back to our world.
• El Santo's time machine (of course he can build a time machine!) in Santo en El Tesoro de Drácula is basically a cheaper-looking version of TV's The Time Tunnel.
• Stargate, which in 1994 began its franchise about portals being left by Ancient Astronauts. The movie is focused on the discovery of a portal found in Egypt, which the villains used to capture and take human slaves to the alien desert planet of Abydos before the humans revolted and buried the Earth Stargate, while the humans stuck in Abydos are still at the mercy of the Goa'uld posing as Ra.
• In Time Bandits, the characters rely on a map to locate "time holes" that lead to various points in time and space.
• Warcraft (2016) has the Portal, which is a gate through which Mass Teleportation can be conducted.

Literature

• In Patricia A. McKillip's The Bell at Sealey Head, Emma keeps opening doors and finding Princess Ysabo. She never dares go in for fear that she can't come back. And one day when she opens the door to her grandmother's room, it shows the princess in a different room. She closes it, reopens it, and finds her grandmother's room.
• John DeChancie's Castle Perilous: The titular cstle has 144,000 doors, each leading to an Alternate Universe, and they don't just wait for you to walk through—the portals wander, and actively seek out those who want to travel or get away. His Skyway series has "Tollbooths" (no doubt named as a Shout-Out to The Phantom Tollbooth) which use miles-tall columns of virtual particles to create wormholes linking a vast Road across thousands of planetary surfaces.
• In The Catastrophe of the Emerald Queen, the magical teleportation device called the Shimmer. Powered by crystals and activated by stepping into a dip in a stone floor. The effect is described as like watching a stone being dropped into water. Can also be rigged or tampered with to enable users to arrive helpless.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Gates of one sort or another appear in every volume except The Horse and His Boy, which takes place exclusively in Narnia. In all six of the others, Gates are needed to get the main characters from the "real" world to Narnia: the titular wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Portal Pools in the Wood Between the Worlds in The Magician's Nephew, the door to the Telmarines' original home at the end of Prince Caspian, the Portal Picture in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the door that normally led to the open moor in The Silver Chair, and the door that normally led to the stable in The Last Battle.
• In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath, Mother Ragga (an Elemental Personification) has a house whose doors can open, it seems, anywhere in the world.
• Chrysalis (RinoZ): All of the surface races use magical gates to travel large distances through the Dungeon. The ants are able to capture some, but can't determine how to activate them; nonetheless, they're determined to work it out in order to interconnect all their nests.
• There's a magical hole in the wall of some sort in Coraline, by Neil Gaiman.
• Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. Powerful Old Ones (such as Merriman Lyon) are able to summon a magical gate (which looks like a pair of doors) that allows travel through time and space.
• In Stephen King's The Dark Tower, Roland discovers a series of doors which allow him to look into other worlds, possess a specific individual on the other side when he steps through the door, and pull that person back through the door into his own world. This is how he eventually gathers his three traveling companions who follow him in the later books.
• Darkness Visible: Reality Thresholds are the driving force behind the plot. Venturers can tear holes in the fabric of reality with their bare hands and, if they're focusing properly, simultaneously open a second Threshold in another location, allowing them to step instantly between the two places. If they aren't focusing properly, bad things happen... Deliberately abusing Thresholds may lead to even worse things happening.
• In Devon Monk's Dead Iron, what LeFel is trying to build.
• In the Deryni novels, the Deryni can use "Transfer Portals" to travel instantly from one place to another. However, there are several drawbacks to Portals: it takes a lot of power to create one; you have to know the 'signature' of the Portal you want before you can travel to it, which means visiting it mundanely first; their positions are fixed, so you can't travel to someplace that doesn't have an existing Portal; and Portals can be "trapped", so that once you transfer to it, you can't leave again until someone with the key comes along and releases you.
• The novelization of the Doom series had the Gate to "Hell" actually be a matter transmitter leading to aliens who used psychological warfare, by imitating feared images from humanity's collective unconscious. But, unlike most fictional interstellar teleportation, it was not faster than light.
• In Andre Norton's Dread Companion, Bartare opens one to transport them from the planet.
• In The Dresden Files, wizards and others practitioners of magic are able to open a hole into the Nevernever (usually the Land of Faerie, the region closest to the physical world), an alternate dimension where physics, geometry, and time don't always work the way they do here. The upside? Rapid transportation for wizards, especially since their magic makes mundane travel hard. The downside? The wizard has to hold it open, and even powerful wizards can only open small holes. It takes a very powerful wizard (Harry's caliber or so) to be able to open a crossing in more than a few places to begin with. And while the Ways are great for getting places, the Nevernever is also where most of the Eldritch Abominations live.
• Dungeon Crawler Carl: Carl comes across references to the Gate of the Feral Gods while fighting his way through the fifth floor. It can open a portal through the Nothing to anywhere the user can work out the coordinates for, but as the portal closes, a feral god will emerge from one end (depending on how precisely it's set up). Mordecai dismisses it as pointless, since it still won't allow them to travel to a later floor (it can open a portal, but it's impossible for crawlers to enter it), and then the feral god will likely kill them. Carl, on the other hand, starts getting ideas. First, he hands it off to different crawlers so that they can escape the "bubbles" that have them trapped. A feral god is left behind in each bubble, but since they can't escape, that's fine. Then he publicly makes plans to drop a feral god on some army fortifications on the Ninth Floor, which will cause a lot of damage and cost his enemies money but not much else. Then what he actually does is flood an NPC city with shark-infested water, killing all the merchants who would sell to the hunters who would be killing crawlers, and keeps the Gate to use later. It's mentioned several times that the Gate is a huge Game-Breaker that tripped all sorts of balance checks and warnings by showing up so early; normally something like this wouldn't show up until the tenth floor at the earliest.
• The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key has an inter-dimensional machine/gate.
• Gate that is about a gate from Japan to a medium-fantasy world.
• The Green Door in H. G. Wells' short story of the same name.
• The Veil in the Department of Mysteries that claimed Sirius is an example of such a portal from Harry Potter. Maybe. It's in the Department of Mysteries because they're not really sure exactly how it works, except that no-one who passes through ever comes back. And the shade of Sirius is later able to be summoned by the Resurrection Stone.
• In Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar series, the Gate Spell reaches across the Void Between the Worlds in order to provide instantaneous travel from one physical place to another. The spell has a number of important limitations; each Gate is a single-use construction created by a powerful mage using his own life force, must be built with both ends in a doorway or similar structure (frames often used for Gates are attuned to the proper energies and are easier to use), and can only go somewhere said mage has been to and knows well. The ancient Adepts of the Mage Wars, on the other hand, knew the secrets of Permanent Gates, which once created are simple to activate and use. From what we see of the mysterious Eastern Empire, it has overcome all the limitations of Gates, to the point of building them into a Magitek society and using them to control vast swaths of territory. This poses a major problem for the Empire when The Magic Goes Away.
• The Manticore Wormhole Junction, and similar junctions elsewhere, in the Honor Harrington novels.
• The door leading out of the title castle in Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle.
• The Farcasters connecting the WorldWeb, in Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos.
• Looking glass bosons, in the John Ringo (and later Travis S. Taylor) series Into the Looking Glass (with shout outs a-plenty to the other looking glass portal, mentioned below).
• The whole Kadingir saga revolves around this, what with the characters being able to open dimensional portals between their world and Earth. The main title itself, Kadingir, means "The Gate of the Gods" in old Sumerian.
• In C. J. Cherryh's Morgaine Cycle, the planet-based gates allow both interstellar and Time Travel. Not to mention body-switching. Also, any Time Travel leading to a Time Paradox triggers a Time Crash which wipes out civilization on every planet containing a gate, which is why Morgaine is on a quest to shut down the Portal Network.
• In the Myth Adventures series, Skeeve's tiny tent leads into a huge luxurious mansion. The mansion is actually in another dimension, which occasionally leads to some problems.
• One means of getting around in the endless world of The Neverending Story is The Temple of a Thousand Doors (Der Tausend-Türen-Tempel) which contains an infinite number of hexagon-shaped rooms with three doors each. Every door different in colour, shape, material etc. To get to the place you wish to go, you only need to pass through the rooms until you find the door that reminds you strongest of the thing/place/person you're looking for. This may take some time.
• In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, Door opens doors. All doors. Her family house had its locations all over the place because they could open the doors between them.
• Nightside: Doors that open to distant locations, times, and/or realities are a dime a dozen, and one minor character even operates a business where people can pay to pass through any of the hundreds of gate doorways he's stocked his shop with.
• Once: An ancient book, kept by successive acquaintances of the faerefolkis, can be used by smaller faeries as a portal.
• The Flumes in "The Pendragon Adventure".
• Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth: The title tollbooth.
• The portable door in The Portable Door by Tom Holt. A door-shaped sheet of something that can be rolled up, but when put against a wall will open to the desired location.
• The Power of Five: The Gates that keep the Old Ones at bay are kinda cool, once you look past how terrifying the entire concept is.
  • On a considerably less scary note, there are also the 25 doors with blue star symbols which allow the Five and up to one other each to travel to any one of their choosing.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: The Wayhouse network Portal Network is referenced multiple times:
  • In the first episode, Princesses Don't Do Summer School, a network failure is why the titular princesses can't go home for the summer.
  • One of their installations are seen in the seventh episode, Princesses in the Darkest Depths, and some Teleportation Sickness is indicated:
    The Wayhouse of Bargoczy was among the newest wave of civic construction to wash over the city, [...] it was solidly built of quarried chalkstone fitted with dark mortar, then stained with strong primary colors. [...] the Wayhouse network's convenience was hampered only by its range. In order to go any appreciable distance, one had to suffer through a daisy chain of transfer points. Few people were willing to pay the cumulative costs, and a larger number of stomachs were unwilling to deal with the stress of so many transfers.
• In The Redemption of Althalus by David Eddings, the protagonists live in a house with as many rooms as they like, as large as they like (they occasionally have armies on the march through the corridors) and can open doors to literally anywhere on command. One of the protagonists attempt, out of curiosity, to open a door to "nowhere"—although they avert the attempt before they succeed, the concept is enough to freak out their patron goddess something fierce.
• In Sergey Lukyanenko's Rough Draft series, the portals to Alternate Universes are shown as regular doors, although they can only be opened by the customs officer-Functional who lives at the customs office. This, as well as the abilities of the Functionals, is explained by their advanced understanding of quantum physics.
• In Douglas Adams's unfinished novel The Salmon of Doubt, one chapter that takes place 1.2 million years into the future mentions a mysterious "Way of the Nostril", and his own planned plot summary for the finished book talks about Dirk Gently travelling "through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos". The implication of this being that someone apparently discovered a method of time travelling that somehow involves passing through a rhino's nose.
• Septimus Heap: The Great Door of Time.
• Twilight gates from the setting of A Tale of the Unwithering Realm. They're golden ring-shaped portals whose rims have the form of three-dimensional Mobius strips, and when they are active a rainbow of colors and a spherical light-bending interdimensional rift appears in the middle.
• In Spin there is the Arch, a gigantic structure connecting to another planet.
• In Patricia C. Wrede's Talking to Dragons, Morwen has one door to all the rooms in her house. When it keeps giving Daystar the wrong ones, she tells him he has to be firm.
• James H. Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon: The Lion Game is set on a planet in the Hub where all transportation was done by gates. The villains in that story have another gate — the Vingarran Gate is too long-range to be useful on the planet surface, but it's ideal for them to transfer people to and from their spaceships hiding in the outer reaches of the solar system.
• Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. Mirrors are frequently used as portals to other realms. There's just something about mirrors...
• The interstellar gates in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Tunnel in the Sky.
• Warhammer 40,000 Expanded Universe:
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel His Last Command, Chaos warp gates open up in boulders to let out monsters. When Maggs is thrown through one, and Mkoll jumps after him, they find a frigid, impossible landscape with the stars all wrong and blocks of stone floating in the sky. They stagger to another gate, which lands them at the foot of another boulder, both of them covered with frost (on the other side, they communicate back through the vox, though it finds them both out of range and within ten kilometers at once).
  • In the Horus Heresy novels The Unremembered Empire and Pharos, the Pharos device can connect two locations directly via quantum entanglement. While it primarily functions as a Subspace Ansible, it can also be used to instantly transport people from one planet to another, and is even used to save several characters from Konrad Curze.
  • The door in Dan Abnett's Ravenor, a plain wooden door that opens through space and time. Originally, it used by special trained operators, to let the questions of those who came to them direct it; when the house was broken, Ravenor operated it to put his powerful psionic abilities into play.
  • In Lee Lightner's Space Wolf novel Sons of Fenris, Cadmus's Blood Magic lets him open a portal to a Chaos Space Marine.
    • In Wolf's Honour, they conclude that the entire planet is riddled with gates, allowing the Chaos Space Marines to invade at will.
  • In Graham McNeill's Ultramarines novel Dead Sky Black Sun, when Sergeant Ellard confesses to having actually seen the rumored daemon on a battle field, he explains that in the end, it summoned up a black gate and vanished into it.
• The Wheel of Time has them in at least three flavors:
  • The redstone doorways look like empty doorframes, but walking through one will transport you to a dimension populated by weird aliens who see the future or grant wishes.
  • The Waygates, built of finely carved white stone and having nice reflection visual effect, which lead to a place where the distance between the Gates is less than outside
  • The One Power-created Gateways for Skimming (travel via subspace) and Traveling (instant teleportation).
  • There are also Portal Stones, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin. They link not only to other portal stones in the world, but also to Portal Stones in Parallel worlds. Very handy, if not well understood at all.
• Stonemover's portals from Wings of Fire, which connect the Rain kingdom and Sand kingdoms with each other and also with the Night kingdom.
• Andre Norton's Witch World:
  • How Simon Tregarth got there in Witch World.
  • Where the Kolder had come from.
  • Where Simon and Jaelithe vanished to, and Kaththea found them and Hilarion.
• Philip José Farmer's World of Tiers series. Inter-dimensional machines/gates.
• The Young Wizards series has "world gates", small patches of space-time only visible to wizards, which occur naturally but can also be created by magic or very advanced technology. Though wizards can teleport without world gates, using a gate requires much less energy, especially for trips that are measured in light-years. On Earth world gate complexes are maintained by teams of cat wizards, since cats are the only Earth species which is naturally capable of seeing the string structures which the gates are made from.

Live-Action TV

• Angel has portals to Pylea. They can only be opened at psychic hotspots and can't be opened too many times.
• Jumpgates in Babylon 5 are used to enter and exit hyperspace.
• In the Doctor Who episode "The Girl in the Fireplace", clockwork androids from the future use the hyperspace drive of a spaceship to create temporal gates disguised as mirrors, tapestries and fireplaces to stalk Madame de Pompadour's lifespan, finding the proper moment in her life to take her.
• Eerie, Indiana: In "The Loyal Order of Corn", Ned came to Earth through a tachyon portal, arriving in Siberia in 1908. The portal broke down immediately afterwards. He founded the Loyal Order of Corn and encouraged the development of radio and television so that human technology would be advanced enough to build another tachyon portal so that he could return home. While investigating the portal, Marshall and Dash X accidentally send Simon to an ice planet.
• Foreign Exchange is about a boy and a girl discovering a portal connecting his house in Perth, Australia to her school in Galway, Ireland. The writers started ignoring the time difference after a few episodes.
• In the Kaamelott episode "Stargate", a "Gate of Chaos", through which "the worst possible creatures" are going to arrive, is opened in Kaamelott. Arthur and Lancelot investigate, Bohort panics until... Perceval steps through. And then a chicken flies through. It turns out the gate leads to another part of the castle.
• Kamen Rider Fourze has an ordinary school locker which connects to a base on the moon.
• The Legend of Dick and Dom has an episode, "Valley of the Bigheads", where the heroes want to use a gate guarded by the Bigheads; to be allowed to use it, they need to prove they are geniuses, which is rather difficult for them. It turns out the gate only transports you ten yards further along the road, and the Bigheads only bother to guard it for lulz.
• The Librarians has The Door. A globe connected to the closet door in the Annex which can magically connect to any other door on the planet.
• Lost: turning the wheel under the Orchid moves the island and teleports the wheel-turner to the Tunisian desert.
• The comedy-fantasy Mister Merlin has a door in Merlin's house that lead to a magical realm.
• The Outer Limits (1963) episode "The Borderland". Scientists generate a gate to another dimension.
• First, you see something like shattered glass floating in the air. Next thing you know, you are being chased by a velociraptor. Welcome to Primeval.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • Episode "Assignment Earth". Gary Seven's "mist gate" transporter.
    • "The City on the Edge of Forever": The Guardian of Forever is a sentient stone ring that can send people anywhere and anywhen.
  • The Iconian doorway from Star Trek: The Next Generation has no apparent limitation to range, and at times opened to the Enterprise-D and the Romulan ship also in orbit.
  • The Iconian doorway reappeared the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "To the Death", under control of a rogue Jem'Hadar faction. The gateway connects to an instantaneous Portal Network that had allowed the Iconians to rule an empire 200k years ago, so the danger of the Jem'Hadar getting control of it is even more pronounced as a result.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine takes place on a space station near a stable wormhole that connects two different parts of the galaxy.
• The Stargate-verse. Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe, all four of 'em had the title gates be as cool as possible. While the details vary between gates, all of the gates activate with an unstable vortex that destroys anything in its path, before settling into a rippling event horizon with the appearance of standing water.
  • The original SG-1 gate◊ is the most iconic. Made of a nigh-indestructible stone-like material inscribed with a ring of constellations, at first glance it looks like a mysterious ancient construct along the lines of Stonehenge or the Easter Island heads. When given power however, the inner ring is able to spin, the chevrons light up, and the gate can be dialed like a rotary phone.
  • The Atlantis gate◊ is like a digital counterpart to the original gate's analogue. Just as indestructible as its predecessor, these gates don't spin at all. Instead, the spinning is replaced with the glyphs lighting up like LEDs, and the sound of stone grinding against stone is replaced with distinctly electronic humming. Additionally, unlike its Milky Way counterparts, many of these gates are in orbit around planets, requiring a ship capable of flying through the gate to traverse safely.
  • In stark contrast to the Atlantis gate is the Universe gate◊, the prototype to the Milky Way gates. These gates may not be as indestructible as its successors, but they're still just as cool. Instead of just an inner ring spinning, the entire gate spins, and instead of the more familiar watery blue event horizon of the other gates, this gate's event horizon is silver.
  • Last but certainly not least is the Supergate◊ from SG-1, an absolutely massive Stargate designed for use by starships. Since making these gates in one solid piece would be extremely impractical — especially in a new galaxy — it's instead build of individual segments sent through a standard Stargate which then assemble themselves in orbit. Due to the astronomical power requirement for these gates to function, they eschew any sort of traditional power source to draw energy directly from a nearby black hole.
• In Stranger Things the monster can seemingly turn any surface into a gate between the normal world and the Upside Down.
• The titular device from The Time Tunnel.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Little Girl Lost", the title character accidentally falls through a spontaneously appearing gate in the wall of her room and ends up in another dimension. Her parents and a family friend try desperately to get her back before the gate closes.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Wall", a group of scientists were researching wormhole physics when a freak accident resulted in the creation of a portal, which is dubbed "the Gate" for lack of a better name. Four volunteers (2nd Lt. Emilio Perez, Sergeants Evelyn Marx and Glenn Sinclair and Captain Henry Kincaid) were sent through the Gate to determine what was on the other side but they failed to return. When the fifth volunteer, Major Alex McAndrews, goes through, he discovers that it leads to a Paradise Planet where the people live a simple, agrarian existence free of the social problems that plague Earth. The US government hopes to use the Gate in order to launch preemptive strikes on its enemies. Although the Gate is constantly visible on Earth, the refraction of light on the other planet means that it can only be seen at night.

Music

• The movement The Great Gate of Kiev (in Russian Богатырскія ворота (Въ стольномъ городѣ Кіевѣ), meaning The Bogatyr Gates (in the Capital in Kiev)) from Modest Mussorgsky's magnum opus Pictures at an Exhibition.
• Touhou – ZUN's Music Collection: The honest men in Dolls in Pseudo Paradise enter Gensokyo through an entrance hidden in a peach tree.

Pinball

• Varkon features a stone gate through which the monstrous Varkon can be seen. Playing well on the main table enables the lower level, allowing players to attack Varkon on the other side.
• The Stargate pinball has the titular gate as the centerpiece of the backbox, using a mirrored "infinity" effect to give the illusion of entering it.
• The "transphazers" of TX-Sector, which are used to teleport pinballs across the playfield.

Podcasts

• Binary Break: The Large Arch functions as one for the kids after chasing Birdbastic through it, and it transports them into the Digital World.

Roleplay

• The Einstein-Rosen bridge from Darwin's Soldiers.

Tabletop Games

• Similar to the Call of Cthulhu example, Arkham Horror has gates to other universes that the players must close in order to win.
• Call of Cthulhu has spells that create Gates through time or space.
• Dungeons & Dragons
  • The portals of the Planescape setting.
  • The Forgotten Realms have many magical Gates, most of which are (naturally) forgotten.
  • The Gate of the Silver Keys in adventure X2 Castle Amber, which leads to the land of Averoigne on another plane.
  • Module Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits. A temple in a Drow city has a mural of a starry sky which is a Gate. If the PCs pass through an image of Lolth and touch it, they will be transferred to the level of the Abyss where Lolth's Demonweb exists.
• Eclipse Phase's Pandora Gates, leftovers of The Singularity and the only current method of reaching planets outside the solar system.
• Exalted has bits of First Age technology called the Gates of Auspicious Passage, allowing one to cross vast distances with a single step (although only to a similar Gate). They require truly monstrous amounts of power to function even for brief periods however, and are extraordinarily difficult to build, repair and program.
• Fading Suns has Jumpgates, ancient relics created by the mysterious Annunaki. They they form the Jumpweb that allows Humanity to travel from planet to planet, connecting Known Space.
• Fringeworthy (1982) was built entirely around this trope: Player Characters were members of a UN military exploration force, walking from world to world through circular portals left by an alien race millions of years before.
  • Rumor has it that a copy of the game was given to the writers of a certain motion picture on the assumption that "Tri-Tac is out of business, and besides, our lawyers are bigger."
• In Nomine has Tethers, nearly all of which connect a specific point on Earth to a specific point in either Heaven or Hell and can only be traveled by celestial beings. A rare few connect Earth to The Marches instead, and exactly three connect The Marches to either Heaven or Hell.
• While not shaped like gates in the conventional sense, every Pantheon in Scion has an Axis Mundi, something that links that Pantheon's Godrealm to the World that's tied to their myth or their people's culture. As examples, the Aesir use Yggdrasil to get between Asgard and any ash tree on Earth, while the Amatsukami use the Pillar of Heaven to get into the Overworld from anywhere that Japanese culture is strong.
• The Necrons of Warhammer 40,000 use portal technology to teleport with impunity. Chaos forces occasionally use portals of their own to access the Warp without waiting for a Negative Space Wedgie.
  • Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain^note HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!!!, cornered by Necrons and wounded, took the one route they had not expected: he jumped through their gate, having seen a wounded Necron come through it and guessing there were friends on the other side.

Theme Parks

• Poseidon's Fury at Universal's Islands of Adventure has guests pass through a "water vortex" (a huge tunnel with flowing water surrounding it) in order to get to the room where the attraction's finale takes place.

Toys

• The "Spirit's Wish" from BIONICLE.

Video Games

• Achron's teleporters and chronoporters (that facilitate mass teleportation and mass time travel respectively) look like cool spinning stargates. Which is a bit unnecessary since no unit actually walks through them.
• Age of Mythology has a whole bundle of them—the adamantine, gods-can't-break-'em Gates of Tartarus alone are worthy of mention. There's also:
  • The gates of Troy (duh), which are as close to magically-indestructible as mortals can get.
    • The even more almost-indestructible Atlantean Gate, made of green granite or something.
  • The cavernous Underworld Passage that Apollo allows you to summon in-game
  • The strip-mined entrance to Erebus constructed by Gargarensis in Iolchis
  • The folding staircase over nothingness leading out of Erebus that Zeus summons to save Arkantos
  • The Well of Urd, also an entrance to Erebus
  • The Sky Passages that Oranos uses to get his followers from place to place
  • The hellhound-sized Tartarus entrance that Hekate summons to release her little minions—shaped like a skull
  • And the various entryways the Titans use when you summon them. Cerberus, Ymir, and the Atlantean rock-thing (Typhon) all have big pit/mound shafts that collapse behind them, but Horus requires you to build him a god-sized landing platform, appropriately decorated, of course.
• Chrono Trigger's aptly-named Gates, which the protagonists regularly use to travel through different time periods. The kicker is that each set of gates can only send them through two specific points in time, always arriving at the same physical location. Because they are too unstable for just anyone to use, Lucca creates the Gate Key to "lock" them in place, allowing the party to use them safely. Using an unstable gate, willingly or not, can send the user into a random period of time, even if a gate hasn't opened yet at the destination. Magus is able to seal one of the gates to keep the party out of his way while posing as the Prophet in 12,000 B.C., and the Epoch allows them to travel through time without the gates. Once Lavos is destroyed, the gates weaken and eventually close.
• The Arkonians of The Crystal Key used simple arches activated by the titular key to provide direct transport between their colony planets. The number of places you can go is determined by the number of "planes" attached to the key. They recently perfected the ability to design portable portals as well, from small remote-controlled ones you can carry around - and which go with you when used, to huge rods mounted on spaceships, which the Arkonians used to deter the malevolent psychic warlord, Ozgar.
• City of Heroes, being filled with superhero tropes, has a generous number of these- from Portal Corps' eponymous portals (which are huge, glowing, have moving bits, and are bloody loud) to the fairy ring portals into the spirit world, to the annoyingly random portals throughout the mystic lost city of Oranbega. It's got something for everyone.
• In Civilization: Beyond Earth, the victory conditions for the Purity and Supremacy affinities involves building the Exodus and Emancipation Gate, respectively. They are so huge that they require a whole game cell to build. They look identical, except the Exodus Gate generates a red portal in which the energy appears to flow outward, while the Emancipation Gate flows inward and glows yellow. The former is used to bring in refugees from the building faction's territory on Earth to settle on the new world. The latter is used to send troops back to Earth to undergo Unwilling Roboticisation.
• Disgaea's dimensional gates warp the user to the selected location.
• Distorted Travesty 3 gives us big swirly holes with blue (or red, in the case of nightmare gates) lightning scything out of it. They can send you to various video game worlds. Such as Castlevania, The Legend of Zelda, and Mario, just to name a few.
• The original Doom has the Phobos and Deimos anomalies, two ancient, connected portals discovered on each of the Martian moons. Unfortunately for the researches studying the anomalies, they work by teleporting matter straight through Hell. When an experiment goes out of control, Deimos is pulled completely through its anomaly and ends up drifting above Hell, forcing the Space Marine to use the Phobos Anomaly to reach it. The anomalies also serve as the basis of the in-game teleporters, which work like a Portal Network and, if the player's not careful, can lead to the trope-naming Tele-Frag.
  • The Continuity Reboot sequel Doom 3 changes the story to remove Phobos and Deimos. Instead, the portals that cause all the current trouble were built by the UAC colonists and based on the Martian civilization's ancient schematics (the schematics were actually meant as a warning, but the scientists missed the fine print). The original ancient portal that doomed the Martians does become a plot point late in the game as, once the human portals have been shut down and the Demonic Invaders seemingly stopped, they blast open the original Martian portal instead.
• Earth & Beyond had a few varieties of gates. Ancient Gates, which according to some in-game material may have been sentient, and could send a ship as far as 100,000 light years. Reverse engineered InfinityGates, far less powerful with only a few light year range. And the singular Tada-O Gate, also reverse engineered from the Ancient Gates, but thought to connect to another galaxy... oops.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The Psijic Order, a powerful Magical Society and the oldest monastic order in Tamriel, has the "Dreaming Cave" on their home island of Artaeum. The Dreaming Cave is a portal to Oblivion and allows for communicating with the Daedric Princes.
  • The Oblivion Gates from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which let Daedra out of the gate's titular dimension. Note that they are shaped like the rune on the box art, which is the letter "O" in Daedric.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
    • There's a portal to Sovngarde in an ancient ruin named Skuldafn. After you defeat Alduin the first time, he uses it to escape to Sovngarde and devour the souls of the dead to replenish his strength. Unfortunately it cannot be reached on foot, something Odahviing neglects to mention until you decide to keep him imprisoned until your return, upon which he quickly offers to fly you there in exchange for his freedom (and Alduin's permanent defeat).
    • In the Dawnguard DLC, Castle Volkihar houses a portal to the Soul Cairn in Valerica's Study. The Dragonborn and Serana travel there to acquire one of the Elder Scrolls detailing the Tyranny of the Sun prophecy.
• EV Nova has a network of Lost Technology hypergates that serve as a Warp Whistle of sorts. Once you get a license to use them via the Sigma Shipyards questline, they allow you to travel between certain star systems instantaneously, whereas using your hyperdrive causes the In-Universe Game Clock to increment between 1 and 3 days depending on your ship's mass. A smart player will memorize the hypergate network, as it's sometimes the only way to get rush jobs done by the deadline.
• All of the major powers in EVE Online have their distinct stargate designs to facilitate interstellar travel.
  • Coolest are the massive border stargates over 20 km across setup at the boundaries of each empire.
    • Not to mention the EVE Gate itself.
• Far Gate's wormholes. Basically a combination of this and Swirly Energy Thingy with DNA-shaped pink and blue strands coming out from the middle.
• If it's in anyway made from the Zilart race, places in Final Fantasy XI feature tons of portals, gates, and what have you. Several other portals and gates also qualify.
  • Some examples. Many of them have special items that allow you to open them like normal doors, but you generally have to be able to get behind the door first:
    • The "Moongate", which only opens for a very short period of time in the rather lengthy in-game moon phases.
    • A certain door only opens when you have a White Mage, a Red Mage, and a Black Mage stand on their respective panels.
    • One dungeon has doors which require a certain amount of 'weight' to be placed on sensors (determined by the amount of player characters, and what race they belong to).
• In Find the Cure! the player character travels through one of these in search of a cure to a plague that will wipe out humanity within 25 years.
• Inverted in Galactic Civilizations. Star Gates were once used for interstellar travel, but they suppressed exploration of other parts of the galaxy because they could only move ships between any two of them, plus it took quite a while for them to transport ships. The rise of Humanity gave rise to Hyper Drive, which allowed ships to travel great distances on their own, rendering the Star Gates obsolete and setting the stage for the game's plot.
• Geometry Dash has these. Enter the blue one, and you come out of the orange one, placed somewhere above or below the blue one. It doesn't work the other way around, though.
• In Ghost Hunter, a painting in a mansion becomes a doorway. On the other side the portal is a plain doorway standing in the open, through which the interior of the mansion can be seen.
• Mailboxes in Glider PRO have instantaneous delivery. It's also common to place teleporters in mirrors and paintings of Ozma.
• Kingdom Hearts has lots of them. Most notably the door to the titular heart of all worlds. It's a game in which the main character wields a gigantic key. Doors tend to be prominent.
• God of War (PS4) features the Bifrost, which is connected to the World Tree and puts down roots to link realms, as seen here.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Door of Time in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is not a portal to the Sacred Realm, but it does bar access to the Master Sword, which in itself acts as the final key to the Sacred Realm. Because Link is too young to fulfill his destiny when he first draws the Master Sword, he is kept in stasis in the Temple of Light within the Sacred Realm, allowing Ganondorf to enter the Sacred Realm and attempt to seize the Triforce unopposed. Functionally, however, Link uses the Master Sword to travel between the past and the future by placing or removing it from the Pedestal of Time.
  • The Mirror of Twilight, a gate to the Twilight Realm in Twilight Princess. By the time Link and Midna find it, however, Zant has already broken it into four pieces, and the duo have to retrieve the three missing pieces before they can travel to the Twilight Realm. Midna shatters the Mirror completely during the epilogue, completely sealing off the Light World and the Twilight Realm from each other forever.
    • There's also the door to the past in the Sacred Grove. Passing through the door sends Link to the Temple of Time from back when it wasn't a forgotten, nameless ruin.
  • The Gate of Time in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. After Impa and Zelda use the first gate to travel to the past, Impa destroys it to ensure Ghirahim cannot follow them. Link then has to reforge the Goddess Sword into the Master Sword in order to awaken the second gate and reunite with Zelda. Once the Imprisoned is destroyed and Zelda awakens in the present, Ghirahim interrupts the reunion, kidnaps her and uses the gate to travel to the past, where his master still lives, so he can restore his power by sacrificing Zelda.
• It's a fairly big plot point that the Citadel in Mass Effect is one of these, linking the known galaxy to wherever the Reapers are. When a group of Prothean scientists who survived the extinction of their people learned about this, they altered the signal that Sovereign, the Reapers' vanguard, used to command the Citadel's keepers, preventing him from opening the Citadel in the current cycle and forcing him to attempt to open it manually by attacking the Citadel with a Geth fleet.
• Interstellar gates are a possible technology in the first two Master of Orion games.
• The gates between Dark and Light Aether in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.
• Minecraft:
  • It is possible to build nether portals with obsidian, obsidian being the most time consuming resource to acquire.
  • As of Beta 1.9Pre4, End Portals are also available. These are even more difficult to find since they are only found in strongholds and only 128 of those spawn on the entire map. Also, the Enderdragon is on the other side of End portal.
    • As of 1.9, after you kill the Enderdragon, yet another Cool Gate spawns in the sky. There is no way to enter it without using an ender pearl, and if you do enter it, you are taken about a kilometre away from the central Floating Continent in the End, where you find endless seas of islands with purple trees and strange castles, sometimes with a Cool Airship docked at them.
• The Conduit from Nexus Clash has the power to create wormhole gates between two points, no matter how distant. Wormholes are stable enough to march an army through - which is usually exactly what Conduits want them for.
• The protagonist's wand is seen to produce a very cool one in the trailer for Ni no Kuni. Presumably it takes him to the titular Another World.
• No Man's Sky has these at mysterious alien temples, which can take players who find them across the universe almost instantaneously (after briefly covering them in a liquid-like substance)... Without their ship, of course; but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
• The Spirit Gate in Ōkami. It takes the player 100 years into the past. The Golden Gates also serve as checkpoints, and Devil Gates lead to a battlefield with more enemies than usual for the area.
• Paper Mario:
  • The Flower Gate in Paper Mario 64's Toad Town leads to Flower Fields -— but only when the four Bub-ulb seeds have been planted in the garden.
  • The titular door in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. It is said to have a legendary treasure waiting behind it, but in truth it is a gate barring access to the Palace of Shadow, the final resting place of the Shadow Queen.
• As mentioned in the Tabletop RPGs section above, Planescape: Torment has a ton of these. It's part of the setting, after all.
  • Not just for transport, too: They provide a handy solution if your BFG is too big to carry.
• Portal is about being able to place portals with a gun.
• Rift Gates in Primal.
• The conspiracies' agents in The Secret World travel using Agartha, a network of portals in and around the branches of enormous biomechanical trees located in the Hollow Earth. (It's that kind of game.) Only a handful of others can use Agartha without ... consequences.
• Splitgate has Portal's portals wholesale, with the caveat that now you also have actual guns to shoot through them. This opens up a lot of trickery depending on the map and your reflexes.
• Subnautica has mysterious arches strewn about the map that heavily resemble a Stargate. Aside from one pair, they're only activated in the endgame as a Door to Before.
• Sunless Sea gives us the Avid Horizon, a creepy portal ornated with two reaperesque figures located at the northernmost point of the Neath. Stars can be seen twinkling above it despite the whole Neath being buried underground, Correspondence sigils are everywhere and the seafloor around it glows an eerie red light. While what lies behind it is never disclosed in Sunless Sea, its sequel Sunless Skies revealed that it leads to the High Wilderness, located deep in space.
• Comically averted in the 7th installment of the Touhou Project series (Touhou Youyoumu ~ Perfect Cherry Blossom): at the end of the 4th stage, the playable character Marisa Kirisame comes across a giant gate at the entrance to the Netherworld; she notices that the gate is magically sealed, and states that a novice magician such as herself wouldn't be able to open it. Then, she is greeted by three ghost musician sisters, and finds out that they were invited for a celebratory musical performance into the Netherworld and are able to enter and leave it at will. Marisa then demands that they open the gate for her, and the three of them fight her. After the ghost musicians are defeated, Marisa tells them to open the gate, and the ghosts say that the gate won't open. Marisa then asks how they enter and leave the Netherworld at will, only to hear that they fly above it.
• Turok's ever present Warp Portals.
• The Vanishing Point in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey.
• The Ultima series had Moongates, which got cooler and cooler each game up to the 9th. Drop a pebble in a ring of standing stones, and with a clap of thunder a bright, shimmering indigo gate springs from the ground.
  • Initially Time Gates (in Ultima ][, directly inspired by Time Bandits), they quickly became associated with the phases of the moon, and then got increasingly complicated as blue, red, and black moongates were introduced.
• The Dark Portal from Warcraft, particularly on the Outland◊ side.
  • The warlock class can create demonic gates through which other party members can be summoned to the gate's location.
  • The mage class can create temporary portals to their respective side's capital cities, as well as the neutral cities added with the expansion packs.
  • The Death Knight class can create a Death Gate, the purpose of which is to allow easy access to Acherus: The Ebon Hold, their Class Order Hall.
  • There are also the portals to the Emerald Dream. Four portals in forested areas around Azeroth (Duskwood, Hinterlands, Feralas and Ashenvale), guarded by hostile dragons until the dragons were removed at the start of the Cataclysm expansion. The other side was not originally accessible in-game, but according to the lore it leads to another dimension that is what Azeroth would be without intelligent humanoid life of any kind, populated by myriad magical beasts. In the Legion expansion the portals opened up and were used by druids to access the Emerald Dreamway which connected to their Class Hall.
  • The Burning Legion actually needs to make huge and powerful magical portals to send their strongest to Azeroth.
• One of the ways to get to new locations in Witches' Legacy. They are often both ways, sometimes they lead to some form of Eldritch Location and other times just somewhere new.
• Egosoft's X-Universe series has both Jump Gates, linking sectors of space, (which may or may not be neighboring in actual space, or millions of light years apart.), while the Terran race has two Jumpgates for Earth, and a network of Trans-Orbital Accelerators, which are basically starship railguns, flinging ships across the Sol system, though they cannot be targeted by the jumpdrive.
  • X: Rebirth retains the Jump Gates, and adds in massive Super Highway gates, which create streams of energy capable of accelerating ships to faster-than-light speeds for interplanetary travel, and smaller highways for travel within planetary orbit.

Web Animation

• In Minilife TV, Minilife Studios has its own time machine which also doubles as a teleporter.

Webcomics

• Glissade portals in Aecast, allowing mages to traverse extreme distances instantly. Care must be made that an end destination is set before walking into it, lest you accidentally end up in Avidya.
• The portal in Between Two Worlds doesn't look like much, because it's camouflaged. It only opens whan the moon is visible and where it leads exactly depends on the moon phase. But it will get you transported to another planet, which is pretty cool.
• Bob and George: The portal
• In Dream Catcher due to running in between the two worlds, Riza gets plenty of use out of a couple. One being a door, the other being the titular dreamcatcher.
• In Endstone, the Eternity Spire let you create them.
• In the comic Flipside, creating a portal involves slapping a door-sized piece of enchanted paper on a surface.
• Girl Genius: The monolith gate inside the Red Cathedral in Mechanicsburg (and by extension, the rest of the Queen's Mirrors).
• Deus, in Grrl Power, combined two pieces of alien/magical technology into something of a "reality cutter"; one of the pieces could do it already, but the combination allows the "cut" to be formed and guided better. After mounting the combination on a (powered) circular frame, an assistant accused him of having a rip-off Stargate; Deus just responds there's no patents on a circle. The first use is to go to a space station for a shopping trip.
• Homestuck Each game planet has seven gates, which teleport players to far-off regions of their planets and to other players' planets. There are also return nodes which, predicably, return the player to their house. Finally, there are defence portals used by Skaia to teleport approaching meteors away to the players planet (most of them land before the players start playing).
• In No Rest for the Wicked, it's surrounded by Creepy Crows, it has to be dug up, it's an ordinary door—flat in the ground; and when they open it, it draws November and Clare in.
• The five Gates in The Order of the Stick, though you're not meant to walk through them — they're built on holes in the fabric of the universe leading to a demiplane containing an Eldritch Abomination.
  • What gates?
• In Planes of Eldlor, the dragons are concerned about the appearance of a strange vertical rift which turns out to be the precursor of a gate to the demonic realm.
• Problem Sleuth: Almost anything can be a gate: windows, traffic lights, hot tubs, corsets... it's a weird story. Also there is the door to Death.
• Thunderstruck's take on magical portals.
• Underling: Portal travel is common. Like this one.
• The portal cloth of Wapsi Square is interesting on its own, but it really becomes a cool gate when it is attached to Shelly. If you enter it, you come out the other cloth, but you have to be able to teleport on your own to use it. It still does have its uses though.

Web Original

• Associated Space uses Catapult Points for interstellar travel. These are giant metal circles placed in orbit around a sun, which gives the devices the immense amount of power necessary to use the things. Once a ship goes into the circle, the gate activates, creating an effect that zaps the ship to another star system, which catches you with similar catapult point, using its immense power to disrupt the effect.
• Tech Infantry has several types.
  • Jump Gates, immobile spaceborne structures that open up a portal to Hyperspace for ships that can't open up a jump point on their own.
  • Digital Gates, immobile spaceborne structures that scan an entering ship, convert it to pure energy, and beam that energy in the form of tachyons, to another digital gate in a distant star system, which re-converts the ship back into matter at the other end, for near-instantaneous interstellar travel.
  • Correspondence Portals, which certain Mages can create as a sort of magical emergency point-to-point teleportation system.
  • Transit Beacons, a weaponized military version of the Correspondence Portal, built into a starship, and used to teleport whole formations of soldiers at once down to the surface of a hostile planet.

Western Animation

• In the Doctor Strange animated movie, the Sanctum Sanctorum contains a gate to Dormammu's realm.
• Family Guy's Poltergeist parody has Meg's butt as one end of a portal.
• The portal in Gravity Falls that Stanford Pines built and fell in.
• In one episode of Legion of Super Heroes (2006), we see a Portal Network's hub, with some very Stargate-verse-esque gates.
• Ninjago: The Ice Temple has a giant torii gate made of ice at its entrance.
• ReBoot copied the Stargate in one episode and brought it back in a later episode. The show also had sphere portals, which functioned in a similar manner.
• In Transformers: Prime the GroundBridge and its big brother SpaceBridges function as long-distance (in the latter case, at least interplanetary) transport gates, with the space "in between" being spacious enough to fight in.
  • The Space Bridge has been seen in many Transformers series - never the same in any two versions, but pretty darned cool in all of them! Depending on the version, sometimes you only need a device on the "sending" end and can target it anywhere, but sometimes you need a device at both ends. There are also versions where they're part of a Portal Network similar to the Stargate-verse's gates, only visible when in use and no hardware ever seen; sometimes bots seem to summon portals out of nowhere but are unable to do it to a place that 'doesn't have a space bridge.'
• The Where's Waldo? cartoon utilized Waldo's "hiding" aspect by making his cane magical—he traced a ring with its tip in the air in front of him to create a portal to anywhere. It was his Evil Twin Odlaw's desire to steal this cane and use it for nefarious purposes.

Real Life

• Well, real theory: Wormholes

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... And you come out here!

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