At this point, it’s beyond a running gag that Half-Life 3 is coming. Whether it’s the meme, the “hints” by Valve, the fanmade sequels, the endless requests by fans, whatever. At this point, it’s probably even valid to say that Valve itself probably doesn’t even know if Half-Life 3 is in the cards. So, leave it up to Gabe Newell to jokingly tease the game yet again.
At the recent Valve Index party for the launch of Valve’s latest VR headset, Newell had this to say during his speech:
“In our history at Valve we have had a lot of significant milestones. Index is another one of those critical milestones for our company… it represents a significant breakthrough in the field.
Milestones aren’t really the end of anything. They’re really the beginning. So Half-Life led to Half-Life 2, Source led to Source 2, the experiments that we did with Team Fortress 2 were what enabled us to build Dota. Artifact is the reason we’re able to do Underlords.
So, maybe someday the number 2 will lead us to that shiny integer glowing on a mountain someplace… we’ll just have to see.”
Joking aside, it’s more than obvious that there are still fans out there looking for closure after the cliffhanger that was Half-Life 2: Episode 2, ten plus years after the fact. Will we see it? With Steam having competition from Epic Games and their exclusivity deals, and the fact that Valve has finally started to make games again, you never know.