Valve insider claims there is no Half-Life 3

Valve surprised the world with Half-Life in 1998 and released a sequel in 2004. After the release of Half-life 2, Valve switched to an episodic model with Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two but it's been over 9 years since we've seen some new action.

Half-Life 3 is probably one of the most anticipated games but does it even exist? Game Informer had a 30-minute interview with a person who works or worked for Valve. The author of the article says it has been a long search to find someone willing to talk about Half-Life 3 because everyone he reached out to either ignored his request or replied with variations of "no comment" and "no thank you".

The source spoke on the condition of remaining anonymous and the author of the article was not able to validate the story because none of his other contacts at Valve wanted to share anything about this matter. Perhaps the most shocking revelation is that there is no Half-Life 3. The source reveals there was some tinkering with new Half-Life projects, but most of the stuff is already dead or going nowhere.

Everyone wants Gordon Freeman’s story to continue. People want the series to reach the number three, either as an episode or a full-fledged sequel. How real are those chances?

There is no such thing as Half-Life 3. 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. I only mention that because it’s sometimes frustrating when people sort of assume or have wishful thinking about the future. Because they want to speak about the future, the fantasy starts to become real in their minds, even though they have a completely different form on the developer side.

If the source is telling the truth, there's nothing going on with Half-Life at this particular point in time. The idea of delivering a third Half-Life 2 episode is dead and it seems Valve developers have grown tired of Half-Life because every time a group comes together to start something new the Half-Life projects always hit an unsurpassable wall and this discourages people from trying again.

How close do you think Half-Life 3 or Episode 3 has come to release?

I’ve heard that some teams have had two to three people working on it, and they eventually ran into a wall, and some teams may have gotten up to 30 or 40 people before it was scrapped.