Ever since a purported employee of Valve wore a Half-Life 3 T-shirt to a game developer event, rumors have circulated that Valve would announce HL3 soon or release an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) campaign. The rumors were boosted by the registration of a website at black-aperture.com, which showed the same HL3 logo from the T-Shirt. It turned out the website was owned by someone with no ties to Valve. People were also finding convoluted hints about Half-Life 3 in the video Valve made when Wheatley from Portal 2 was nominated for a “Character Of The Year” VGA from Spike. Then Valve released the acceptance speech video they would have used if Wheatley had won, and some assumed his statement “maybe next year” was pregnant with meaning.
Now Valve’s Chet Faliszek has posted on Steam about all these Half-Life 3 murmurings:
You are being trolled.
There is no ARG.
Wheatley’s speech was set in Portal 2 fiction – that is all.
There has been no directive from Gabe to leak anything. That is all false.
I just want to say this so there is no confusion. This is the community trolling the community nothing more. While it is nice to see people excited about anything HL, I hate seeing people be trolled like this.
We heard you loud and clear, Chet. Half-Life 3 is totally on its way and all the rumors are true. You heard the man.
I want to believe.
[Hat tip and cake to Kotaku and TheDailyWhat.]