Half Life may never be continued, and Half-Life 3 has never formally existed, according to an anonymous Valve source in an intriguing new interview entitled, “Searching For Half Life 3” by Andrew Reiner.
The interview was published by GameInformer and follows recent revelations regarding a number of Half Life 3 prototypes, including an RTS and a live action affair. Fans naturally want to know the source of this information, so the interview has been published in full and is linked above.
However, the reason that GameInformer did not go live with this earlier was that it was unable to verify the information with a corroborating source. That said, it stands by its unnamed source, and the information seems to match up with other discussions of the company culture surrounding Valve.
“There’s something with that third episode that isn’t sitting right with Gabe and other people at Valve. Ultimately it just starves to death. The people that tried to give it life find themselves better off working on other projects. What you have left is nothing going on with Half-Life.” The alleged insider stated.
They continued pretty bluntly, stating, “there is no such thing as Half-Life 3” and that “Valve has never announced a Half-Life 3.”
“The closest they’ve come is after Half-Life 2, they said there would be three episodes. We only got two of those. That is arguably an unfulfilled promise. Anything else that we might think about as a full game or sequel has never been promised.”
Valve has the structure where anybody could start work on a project they intended as a Half-Life game, and the source said this happened maybe a dozen times, and sometimes has collected a team of up to 40 staff members. However, with no support from the upper echelons, these projects burn out right then and there.
“When they were making episodes for Half-Life 2 that was probably the best and strongest effort that ever happened toward another Half-Life project,” the insider said. “You have people that were working on Half-Life, people that finished Half-Life: Episode 2, that already imagined where they wanted to go next – they were cooking, and wanted to keep the wheel spinning.”
The full interview is fascinating, but the one who conducted it, Andrew Reiner, warns readers to take what is said with a grain of salt until other Valve employees come forward to either confirm or deny what has been said.
