Half-Life 3 Confirmed

About

Half-Life 3 Confirmed is a catchphrase associated with the rumored announcement of the fifth installment in the popular Half-Life franchise developed by Valve. Since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 in October 2007, fans have long anticipated the next installment in the franchise, which over time lead to numerous intentionally fake theories that have little to nothing to do with the games, alongside various stories which claim the release of the game to be coincident with The Rapture

Origin

Valve's Half-Life^[14] franchise started on November 19th, 1998, and was as well the debut title of Valve Software. On November 16, 2004, Valve released Half-Life 2, the sequel to the original game. This was followed by Half-Life 2: Episode One on June 1, 2006, and Half Life 2: Episode Two on October 10, 2007. Originally, Valve intended to release the episodes 6 months apart. Instead, Episode Two was released over a year after Episode One, and Half-Life 2: Episode Three, which was supposed to follow 6 months after Episode 2, has been delayed indefinitely.^{[15] [16]} Following the release of Episode 2, in an exclusive interview with StuffWeLike.com on December 12, 2007, Valve marketing director, Doug Lombardi stated that a third entry in the main Half-Life series would happen following the end of the Episodes.^[26] The interview was reported on the next day by SK-Gaming in a piece titled "Half-Life 3 confirmed".^[27] The following day a second piece titled "Half-Life 3 confirmed" was posted on the site Team Rebellion.^[28]

Since the episode's announcement in 2006, and the release of a number of concept art images in 2008 (shown above), there have been a number of rumours and hoaxes regarding the supposed announcement of a release date for Episode Three, all of which have been denied by Valve.

Spread

Prior to large gaming events, such as the Electronic Entertainment Expo, speculations on the announcement of Half-Life 3 are often made surrounding Valve's presentation during the events, which are commonly later debunked by various gaming websites as it becomes clear the sequel won't appear during the event.

In early August of 2012, numerous rumors were released which speculated that Valve was working on a new gaming engine. This was later confirmed during a visit of 4chan's /v/ (videogames) board at Valve in celebration of Gabe Newell's 50th birthday (shown below) in early November of the same year. Both the rumors and the confirmation on the new engine lead to various websites speculating it to be the reason Half-Life 3 was delayed numerous times, such as VG 24/7,^{[1] [2]} Joystiq,^[3] Eurogamer,^[4] Trusted Reviews^[5] and Now Gamer.^[6]

On June 8th, 2012,^[12] and April 2nd, 2013,^[13] Julia Lepetit and Andrew Bridgman submitted 2 comics to the videogame humor sharing website Dorkly about the constant excitement of Half-Life 3 and the common release claims on April Fools' day. As of June 17th, 2013, both comics received respectively more than 990 and 5,400 Facebook likes.

On April Fools Day 2013, a store page^[17] was added to the Valve Steam store for Half-Life 2: Episode Three, which turned out to be an advertising stunt from bargain hunting website CheapShark. This joke was covered by various gaming websites such as Destructoid,^[18] ScrewAttack^[19] and Game Revolution.^[20] On June 10th, a picture appeared (shown below) on the r/gaming sub-Reddit^[10] which showed a Half-Life 3 poster at the convention, which was subsequentally posted on FunnyJunk^[11] the same day. Although the picture was proven fake pretty early, it managed to gain nearly 5000 upvotes on Reddit and more than 600 on FunnyJunk in less than a week.

Valve's Trademark Registration

On September 29th, 2013, Valve filed a trademark request for the name "Half-Life 3" with the European Union, as evidenced by the document publicly available on the EU's Trademarks and Designs Registration Office website. Then on October 1st, NeoGAF forum member Shinobi602 shared screenshots of the trademark request form in a thread titled "Valve files trademark for…,"^[21] generating more than 750 responses from the community in less than 48 hours.

Inevitably, fan speculations about the Half Life 3 project began to spread wildly across the gaming community^{[22][23][24][25]}, which became further strengthened by leaked information from Valve's internal bug-tracking Jira database confirming that there are two development groups involved with the project, one marked "Half-Life 3" with 46 staff members and another one marked "Half-Life 3 Core" with 10 staff members.

Marc Laidlaw's Blog Post

On August 25th, 2017, former Half-Life leader writer Marc Laidlaw posted a blog post titled "Epistle 3," which many speculated was a plot summary for the Half-Life 3.^[29] The post is written as a letter addressed to "Dearest Playa" from "Gertie Fremont." That day, a synopsis of the letter rewritten with actual characters from the Half-Life series was uploaded to Pastebin.^[30] Meanwhile, a post about Laidlaw's letter was submitted to /r/Games,^[31] where it gathered upwards of 11,400 points (95% upvoted) and 1,500 comments within 15 hours. Also on August 25th, YouTuber Valve News Network uploaded a video discussing Laidlaws post (shown below).

Notable Examples

Additional examples can be found through the Tumblr tags "half life 3"^[7] and "half life 3 confirmed",^[8] and through FunnyJunk by searching for "half life 3 confirmed".^[9]

Search Interest

External References