GAME BYTES: Has ‘Half-Life 3' been confirmed?

Last Modified: Wednesday, July 3, 2013 at 11:49 a.m.

Guys. It's been five years and nine months since "Half-Life 2: Episode Two" wowed us, and in that time we've seen no new "Half-Life" games. Yeah, got two "Portal" games, and those are technically within the "Half-Life" universe, and Valve managed to distract us from our longing with a new "Counter-Strike" game, but come on. We're going to get to the six-year mark without having any news whatsoever about what's going on with the top-rated PC game franchise of all time.

Last week, a weird update came down for "Half-Life 2" on Steam. It turned all the text in the game into Korean, and that kinda confused everyone. Soon after, the Steam Support Twitter account tweeted an acknowledgment of the "goof," with the clause "prepare for unforeseen consequences" written in Korean at the end of the tweet. That, you might recall was the message from the G-Man to Eli Vance in Episode Two, delivered by our beloved Alyx shortly before Eli was killed at that game's cliffhanger ending. Naturally, that set off all sorts of alarm bells in our heads.

And then, a couple days later, "Surgeon Simulator 2013" received some "Team Fortress 2" goodies — "TF2," you'll remember, is a Valve title originally released with "The Orange Box" alongside "Episode Two." On the back of one of these items was a strange sketch along with Korean text that read "the time is," which was the first line in the original "Half-Life."

And so, of course, the Internet flew into a tizzy after all this, thinking the Korean text was part of an alternate-reality game tying into "Half-Life 3" in some way. Folks at Valve and "Surgeon Simulator" developer Bossa Studios claim it totally isn't. Really, they swear.

But I want to believe, and so do a lot of other folks, because it's been freaking five years and nine months since the last game. Since "The Orange Box" was released in October of 2007, I've played six different "Call of Duty" games and six different "Assassin's Creed" games. But we're all still waiting on a new "Half-Life" that we know absolutely nothing about. And it's starting to wear us down.

I've tried to put it out of my head by not playing the old games again, and I've gotten pretty good about it as I've obsessed myself with "Mass Effect" and "Star Wars: The Old Republic" whenever I had free time in between playing games for review. But when something like this sequence occurs, it all comes back up. My emotions run wild. Because I want to believe.

And I'm going to. Valve can deny this ARG all it wants to, but I'm going to believe that news is on the horizon at least until we go a couple weeks without any Korean text showing up in a Steam game. Because, seriously, my mind has a difficult time getting excited about new games these days, but this potential tease has gotten me so worked up.

I'll be watching you, Valve. Prepare for unforeseen consequences, indeed.

Phil Owen is a freelance video game critic and columnist.


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