It’s no secret that one of the saddest stories in all of gaming is that of the Half-Life series, particularly the cliffhanger ending from Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Debuting in 1998, the critically-acclaimed dystopian first-person shooting and adventure series has been dormant since 2007; although gamers were promised a resolution to Episode 2‘s ending, a decade has passed with no word on whether or not we’ll ever see Gordon Freeman again.
Now, thanks to an interview Eurogamer did with developer Warren Spector, we have some new details, even if it’s not necessarily the closure we’ve all been wanting. Spector, known for System Shock and the Deus Ex series, says his team was actually working on an episode for Half-Life 2, although he didn’t explicitly describe it as Half-Life 2: Episode 3. They even created a weapon to compliment Half-Life 2‘s gravity gun:
“We came up with so many cool ways to use a magnet gun that were completely different from anything [Valve] had done and was really free-form in its use,” Spector says, adding that Mickey Mouse, of all things, is the reason his team walked away from the project: “I still think it’d be cool, but when the deal with Disney really started to bear fruit, I just couldn’t say no to Disney. I’d always wanted to work there, so we never completed the work with Valve.”
Of course, Spector is referring to his work on Epic Mickey, which got positive reviews and strong sales, but its sequel faltered and performed poorly in both of those particular measurements.
Images released with the interview show a snow-covered Ravenholm, and Spector says the area would have included “puzzles, scripted sequences and fights.” A fourth Half-Life 2 episode, entitled “Return to Ravenholm,” was also under development by Arcane, the studio behind the Dishonored series.
However, it looks like these are just shadows of what could have been. At the moment, the series appears to be in an eternal limbo, with at least one “insider” saying Half-Life 3 will never happen. You can see the rest of the images from Spector’s cancelled Half-Life 2 episode here.
