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In June of 2011, Gearbox Software released Duke Nukem Forever. The fourth mainline entry in the Duke Nukem series, Forever disappointed tremendously with its shoddy level design, tired tropes, and assortment of technical issues. To the industry at large, however, the fact that Forever had made it to store shelves at all was still amazing – for prior to this, the much-maligned shooter had been in development hell for over fourteen years, churning and molting through endless iterations under its original stewards at 3D Realms.

What had once been one of the industry’s most infamous cases of vaporware had finally managed to see the light of day – and over course the next ten years, many more cases of vaporware would follow suit. Fumito Ueda’s The Last Guardian would emerge from obscurity and be re-unveiled as a PlayStation 4 game. Final Fantasy Versus 13 would be re-worked into Final Fantasy 15. Even Shenmue 3, which fans had long given up as a pipe dream, would manage to find its way onto store shelves after a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Yet amidst all of this, a little known first-person shooter by the name of Half-Life 2: Episode 3 would continue to remain elusive. The third episodic expansion to Half Life 2, Valve had originally announced that Episode 3 would see release by 2007, and set the stakes for the series’s next mainline entry, Half-Life 3. By 2017, however, neither the expansion nor the threequel were anywhere to be seen. A consistent stream of rumors, leaks, and even teases from Valve proper suggested that the company still had every intention of returning to its landmark science-fiction series in some fashion, with a decent number of sources suggesting that it might even jump into the realm of virtual reality. But there was no timeline of when this return would happen, and no reason to believe Valve would put its money where its mouth was. While the company continued to support the likes of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2 with new content, and make the odd VR experiment here and there, it seemed at least from the outside as if the company had become consumed by its passion for creating hardware, and no longer cared about game development.

This is the revival of Half-Life.

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