Why Valve Hasn’t Talked About Half-Life For So Long

During the same Reddit AMA that confirmed Half-Life: Alyx will feature some horror elements, at least one fan couldn’t help but point out that it all seemed a bit strange that Valve is not only making a new Half-Life game but actually talking to the community about it. Surprisingly, Valve addressed that comment.

“Half-Life isn’t like Fight Club,” said a Valve representative via the studio’s Twitter account. “There was never a first rule of ‘we must never speak of it!'”

So why did it take so long for Valve to talk about Half-Life again? It turns out that it’s not that complicated. 

“We didn’t talk about Half-Life for a long time because we weren’t actively working on a Half-Life game,” says Valve. “Once Half-Life: Alyx became a reality internally, it was already clear to us that this was something we wanted to involve the community in. We’re going to be doing more of this in the next few weeks as we prepare to launch it!”

Well…that certainly seems to explain that. It certainly makes sense that Valve wouldn’t really feel the need to talk about Half-Life until there was something to talk about. Elsewhere in the AMA, they even mentioned that the studio had been working on the game for some time before its official reveal, so it even seems like they didn’t feel the need to talk about the title until it was further along and there was something to show. 

Having said that, it’s possible there’s a bit of creative wordplay involved in this statement. It’s been suggested in the past that Valve at least kicked around some ideas for Half-Life 3 at one point, so we wouldn’t say it’s not like there was complete radio silence between the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and the reveal of Half-Life: Alyx. Instead, it seems that any initial work done on Half-Life projects before Alyx just wasn’t significant enough to really go into. 

Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.