The more than two decades since then Half-life 2's release is filled with many rumors and hints about Half-life 3ranging from official to flimsy to downright misleading. As we head into 2025, we are approaching something close to a critical mass of rumors and leaks indicating that Half-life 3 is actually in the works this time and could be officially announced in the coming months.
The latest tease came just before the end of 2024 via a New Year's Eve video on social media from G-Man voice actor Mike Shapiro. In the voice of the mysterious in-game bureaucrat, Shapiro expresses the hope that “the next quarter century [will] deliver as much as possible unexpected surprises just like the first of the millennium (emphasis added)… See you in the new year.”
#Valve #Half-life #GMan #2025 pic.twitter.com/mdT5hlxKJT
— Mike Shapiro (@mikeshapiroland) December 31, 2024
The post is all the more notable because it is Shapiro's first in more than four years, as he posted a series of promotional posts surrounding the release of Half-life: Alyx (many of which had a character like G-Man). And in 2020, right after that AlyxFollowing its release, Shapiro told USGamer that he had recently been working on a “blast from the past” project that he would “announce… on my Twitter feed if I may” (such an announcement is for no some others announced). game).
“Before I knew it, I had been working on that game for a while [what it was]” said Shapiro at the time of the unannounced project. “There was a rehearsal and some shooting, and after one of the recording sessions I had a drink with the director. He told me what the game was, and no one knows this is coming.
“This is going to be such a mind-boggling reiteration of what people have come to know,” Shapiro continued in 2020. “It's really going to… it's going to make people have a completely new understanding of what they thought they knew about the story in the game before, and I don't even know if people expect it.”
Increased HLX pectations
On its own, a single in-character post from a voice actor would probably be a bit too cryptic to titillate Half-life fans who have seen the hope of a sequel evaporate so many times over the past twenty years. But the unexpected tease comes amid a wave of leaks and rumors surrounding “HLX,” an internal Valve project that has recently been referenced in a number of other Source 2 engine game files.
