Tweet
Could Valve finally be preparing to end its silence on Half-Life?
Valve has filed for a trademark on Half-Life 3 in Europe, perhaps indicating the developer finally plans to move forward with the first-person shooter series it made its name on.
The trademark was filed for on September 29 and lists Valve as its owner. It's a standard trademark filing, offering little more than the name, owner, and classification, which, as you'd expect, describes it as "video game software."
Half-Life was last seen in 2007 in the form of Half-Life 2: Episode Two. It was one of three new games included in The Orange Box alongside Portal and Team Fortress 2. Since that time, Valve has been busy, developing or contributing to the release of Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, Alien Swarm, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Dota 2. There's also the matter of Steam, and the massive steps forward it's taken, seen most recently in the form of SteamOS, Steam Machine, and the Steam controller.
Countless Half-Life rumors have surfaced over the past half decade, with little or no official word to be had from Valve, which had actually set out to reduce the time in between Half-Life releases by turning to an episodic format following Half-Life 2. Last year, there was talk of an open-world Half-Life game. More recently, internal documents from Valve suggested that Half-Life 3 and Left 4 Dead 3 might both be in the works.
A trademark filing alone guarantees nothing, but after such a long drought, this does at least give Half-Life fans reason to feel optimistic
