Half-Life 3 is Real

Is Valve trolling yet again, or is this confirmation?

by Nicholas Laborde

©2012 Nicholas Laborde

At this point in space and time, if anyone from Valve uttered the phrase “Half-Life 3″ the entire internet as we know it would implode upon itself and break the space time continuum, truly allowing 2012 to live up to the Mayan’s expectations.

Valve are known for trolling their fans on a consistent basis, but only because they love us so dearly.

They could be up to it yet again, or this could be concrete evidence that Half-Life 3 does in fact exist.

UPDATE #2: The website Black Aperture (here) has been updated… with a 3. So, today’s a day for HL3!

The newest blog post on the Left 4 Dead blog is our source, with the post detailing the new Mann vs. Machine cooperative update to Team Fortress 2.

At the very end of the article, they post a link to the official page on the TF2 website.

Today, Team Fortress 2 is adding co-op and robots to their game! There is only one problem – don’t worry, robots are just the zombies of the future that’s not the problem – the problem is this is 6 player co-op not 4. So you’re gonna need to find a few new friends, a younger brother, your mom, someone, anyone to join you and your three friend to fight the lethal horde of robots.

And don’t forget Team Fortress is free, so when you invite your new found friends to the game – tell ‘em you bought it for them and it set you back $50. It’s your early birthday gift to your 4th and 5th favorite people in the world…

Visit www.teamf6rtress.com/mvm/ for more information.

Since the site is fake, we do not advise signing in to Steam through this page.

Seems everyday enough, doesn’t it?

If you look at the link itself, there’s a six instead of an ‘o’ in the link. Copy that link and go to the address without clicking on it, and we have either concrete proof of Half-Life 3 or the damnedest attempt at trolling that I’ve ever seen.

Validity

The link takes you to the Steam Community page of presumably a Valve employee, where his status for current game (at the time of posting) was “Half-Life 3: Indev”.

Obvious conclusions based on the title would either be that he’s in a non-Steam game that he renamed, but if that were the case, it wouldn’t reflect the changed name on his profile page.

Adding further fuel to the fire, if you look further down the page, you can see that it’s his most played game recently, logging 28.8 hours out of 94.8 in the past two weeks.

I have many colleagues in the industry, including those whose games are on Steam, and when they are working while Steam is booted up for an unreleased game (even if the game itself is already on Steam) it simply says that they are “in-game” but without listing a title.

This could either be someone working on Half-Life 3, or a playtester who could have been given incentive to log in with their own Steam account when testing.

The vast amount of hours – nearly one hundred – does not lead me to believe that Valve is trolling.

Soon…

I assume we’ll hear more on Half-Life 3 soon.

And by Valve’s schedule, that means before we die.

Keep checking back to this article for any developments.

UPDATE #1: Further investigation reveals that the domain was a typo, yet was registered before the update. The profile page in question is fake, and is under a custom domain. But how it was pulled off and the coincidences of the situation are unsettling.

©2012 Nicholas Laborde

Filed under: 3rd Party Games, Console gaming, Game Industry News, New Game Information, New PS3 Games, New Xbox 360 Games, PC News, PC Previews, Press Release, Software News & Updates, Xbox 360 Tagged: | games, Gamescom, Half Life 3, half-life, Steam, Team Fortress, Valve, Valve Corporation