I’ve spent so much time over the past few years shrugging my way through conversations about Half-Life 3? When does it come out? Are they even making it? What’s it gonna be? I don’t know the answers to most of these questions, but then who does outside of the walls of Valve? I’m not convinced they even know. That doesn’t stop the interwebs from soaking up every ounce of information, though and today brings a new batch of rumor-fueling goodies.
Today OXCGN brings a new helping of clear and definitive proof that Half-Life 3 is not only a game that is being developed for release but that Valve loves fucking with us and to be honest, I think they’re right on both counts. Especially the second part. Valve is totally fucking with us.
OXCGN’s proof begins with a blog post on the Left 4 Dead website which looks pretty by-the-numbers, highlighting the recent announcement of a ‘co-op and robots’ addition to Team Fortress 2, followed by a link to the Team Fortress 2 website. Right now, all that is in order and as proper as can be, but sharp-eyed fans noted that the website link originally had a typo.
What’s more, if you decided to copy and paste that web-address rather than simply clicking the link (which would take you to the TF2 page), you’d find yourself looking at the Steam profile page of, presumably, a Valve employee. Why a Valve employee? Because according to his activity sidebar he has recently been playing a game referred to as ‘Half-Life 3: Indev’. What’s more, this individual has racked up just under 95 hours of ingame time in the past two weeks.
The speculation inevitably imploded from there. Is he a developer? A play-tester? Does this mean Half-Life 3 is closer to release than anyone could have anticipated? So. Many. Questions. And once again I shrugged. Given Valve’s peculiar habit of saying absolutely nothing, any of these particular suggestions could be true. If Valve came out and announced that Half-Life 3 would be a Steam exclusive, available next week, I’d believe it, because they’re the only company capable of pulling off such a batshit crazy move and that’s not even factoring in the crazed fervor with which people anticipate HL3. I mean, hell, just look at the way they leaked this information. They used the blog of one game to tout another game, whilst including a link to ‘confirmation’ of an unannounced third game and then covered that link up explaining that it was a typo. This doesn’t make an iota of sense because why would this bizarre typo ever be affiliated with a Steam account? [Update: Turns out this is a fake page. Seems as if the typo was genuine and somebody pounced on an opportunity to mess with everyone. Apologies to Valve for doubting their 'cover up', I should have known they'd do a much more classy job of it.]
And then Valve updated the Black-Aperture page, that has been suggesting that Half-Life 3 is coming since December, with a big ’3′ . I’m cutting out the middle man here and saying that Valve updated it because it’s been proven that Black-Aperture links to a Valve owned Half-Life 3 domain. They aren’t even trying anymore are they? They’re screwing with us.
Can we all just acknowledge that Half-Life 3 exists and wait for Valve to announce it, already? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
[Source, OXCGN]
Billy is 21 years old, enjoys dumb stuff and has a tendency to write when he isn’t busy welcoming our inevitable zombie/robot/alien overlords.
I never saw what the big deal about Half Life was. Fun game in its own right i suppose, but it isn’t the second coming.