Valve Don’t Announce Half Life 3

Hey, we all also thought Donald Trump would never, ever be President of the United States.

Steam punk overlords, Valve have announced a new game. This game was not Half Life 3, or Half Life 2 Episode 3.

Before Valve became famous for opening an online shop they were an unknown, but industry lauded game development studio. In a portfolio of critics’ darlings, Half Life was their single most praised series. The Half Life games were a narrative tale as much as a set of finely tuned mechanics and physics designed to cause joy in players willing to try more than just mowing down hoards of aliens. They also had hordes of aliens to mow down.

Half Life was also a promise. A promise of a trilogy, carrying the audience through to a thrilling conclusion.

We Googled “Silent Protagonist” but couldn’t find Gordon Freeman. We assume he is in the basement at Valve frantically cobbling together Half Life 3 out of whatever scraps of game they store down there every time another game programmer leaves.

But the franchise was doomed to only ever reach a half life, getting to middle age before finding much more success in shilling other developers’ games, never returning to the tortured promise of youth personified in Gordon Freeman, the protagonist so angst ridden and emo that he refused to utter a single word to anyone.

And with the non-announcement of Half Life 3 we can not look forward to still not continuing the journey of Gordon Freeman and the Half-verse.

Today Valve also did not announce Portal 3, or DotA 3.