It's been 19 years since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and yet the ceaseless clamour for a Valve game with a number '3' in its title continues. And following a swell of reports suggesting Half-Life 3 isn't just real, its development is well underway, a Valve developer has gone and sent the internet a-chatter all over again by publicly, albeit accidentally, referencing its codename during a livestream.

Valve's first attempt at releasing a Half-Life game with a '3' in its name would have been the ill-fated Half-Life 2: Episode 3, which was abandoned - despite Valve previously announcing it as part of a planned trilogy - sometime around 2009. After that, the studio seemingly had a crack at making a full-blown sequel, with Valve boss Gabe Newell confirming a few years back that Half-Life 3 had been in development around 2013/2014, but was ultimately scrapped because it was built on the unfinished Source 2 engine.

Sometime in 2021, however, dataminers began to notice something interesting: repeated references to a project codenamed "HLX" in Valve-related files. Inevitably, this led to a frenzy of speculation that Valve might finally be reviving its seminal, if long-dormant, first-person shooter franchise. And evidence has seemingly continued to amass over time. In 2024, for instance, Valve insider Tyler McVicker shared some of his datamined findings , claiming what he'd found pointed to a new "fully-fledged Half-Life game" - a claim coinciding with a leak from an actor likely involved in the project.

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