LogInCould a year and a half of rumors be leading to the biggest video game reveal of all time?
HLX. Over the past year and a half, those three letters have somehow managed to reignite the anticipation of many gamers who still hope Valve is secretly working on Half-Life 3 – a hope many had abandoned a long, long time ago.
Allegedly serving as a codename for Half-Life 3, HLX has been mentioned in countless rumors that can be summed up as "the game is real, it exists, it's likely in its final stages, an announcement could come at any moment." Pouring more gasoline on the fire of speculation is the latest video from Tyler McVicker – whose findings reinvigorated the HL3 discussions in the first place – where he shared that Valve may already be working on the game's announcement trailer.
Emphasizing several times that this remains just a rumor and is not supported by any data found in the code of Steam or Valve's games, Tyler stated that a trailer for the enigmatic title could already be in the works, noting that if this is indeed the case, it would be a huge deal considering Valve's particular approach to making trailers.
Unlike most other AAA studios, Tyler explained, Valve doesn't produce trailers years ahead of release – trailers that typically feature carefully scripted moments meant for marketing purposes and that often don't represent the final product – and instead tends to create trailers much closer to launch, when the finished game is already 100% finalized or is in the polishing stage of production (essentially 99% finalized).
As an example, Tyler pointed to Half-Life: Alyx, whose announcement trailer was purportedly created only a couple of months before its reveal on November 21, 2019. With Alyx itself releasing shortly afterward on March 23, 2020, this timeline suggests that – once again, IF the rumors are true, and that's one enormous IF we're talking about here – HLX could be only a few months away from launch, if not less.
The chain of rumors about Half-Life 3 being in development – the one relevant in our case, that is – began in August-September 2024, when Tyler reported that Valve was working on two Half-Life games: a VR title and HLX. The latter was later assumed to be the codename for Half-Life 3 specifically because Valve had previously used "X" to conceal the number "3" during the development of Left 4 Dead 3, which was ultimately canceled due to issues with the Source 2 engine.
Shortly after, Tyler published another video claiming that even if it ends up not being titled Half-Life 3, HLX will still feature Gordon Freeman as its protagonist and will conclude the story of gaming's original strong-and-silent type.
A couple of months later, the "HLX speculation" was joined by Gabe Follower, one of the biggest Valve enthusiasts and the second key figure in the discussion, who, in November 2024, shared numerous findings from the code of other Valve games related to the Source 2 engine's capabilities.
His discoveries suggested that HLX could include procedural mechanics, dynamic weather and time-of-day systems, improved gravity manipulation, new NPC interactions, revamped physics, and more – the list of potential features was so extensive that it was hard to believe a game of lesser significance than Half-Life 3 would receive such treatment.
All the findings from 2024 culminated in a rumor that Valve was set to announce the game at the year's The Game Awards ceremony, which, sadly, ultimately turned out to be nothing more than wishful thinking.
Not even a full day into 2025, the speculation reached perhaps one of its highest points when, amid all the data findings and gossip mentioned above, Mike Shapiro, the voice actor of G-Man of all characters, shared a cryptic tweet – his first tweet since December 2020, by the way – with hashtags #Valve, #HalfLife, #GMan, and #2025, along with an enigmatic message (transcribed below) that, unsurprisingly, sent the community's excitement through the roof.
"Another year already. Good to see and hear from so many of you. May the next quarter century deliver as many unexpected surprises, hmm, as did the millennium's first. Then again, time is fluid like music. See you in the new year!"
As if anything else was needed to fuel the hype, 2025 also brought a slew of discoveries suggesting that HLX was real and nearing completion. Among the most notable were one of Deadlock's updates, which included the code string "hlx_fsr3," referring to AMD's upscaling and frame generation technology – something usually only seen when a project is close to the finish line – and a revelation from Valve's former Concept Artist Evgeniy Evstratiy, who stated that he had been in the room where Valve worked on Half-Life 3, and although he didn't see any actual development in progress, he did see computers and whiteboards.
So, where does this leave us? Even with the flood of rumors, data findings, revelations, and circumstantial evidence – enough to probably fill a book or two – there is, as of now, no official confirmation from Valve or any of its employees – who likely remain silent not just because of NDAs, but due to the sheer significance of the secret they may or may not be keeping – that HLX/Half-Life 3 is about to be announced or that it even exists in the first place, meaning that everything – and I do mean everything, even Shapiro's tweet could be nothing more than trolling – outlined above should be taken with a grain of salt.
Is Half-Life 3 real? Is it close to release? If it is announced, could it outshine the current most-anticipated game, GTA VI? Does Valve's presence on The Game Awards 2025's advisory board actually mean anything? As is always the case with this company, the only thing we know for sure is that we know nothing – whether that's good or bad is up to you to decide.
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