Look, Half-Life 3 is never going to happen. There, I said it. Feel free to @ me (I’m ever so lonely). That’s not to say I don’t want it to happen, but I’ve pretty much given up at this point. It’s been 20 years. However, not everyone is quite as pessimistic as me. Or maybe they are and just show it in other ways.
Over on the YouTube channel Hazard Time, a person who we can assume is called Clive, based on their video thumbnails, has been posting “updates” about Half-Life 3 and its whereabouts. They’ve been doing this every day for over six years. No seriously. Check it out. Here’s the newest one (video #2002).
While there are some other topics of discussion – such as whether they want to go see the new Planet of the Apes film – the crux of this series is this: there’s no news about Half-Life 3.
I sense sarcasm
Look, I’m not going back through all 2,000 videos to ascertain what Clive is saying in each one. But looking at the playlist on their channel, you can clearly see they’ve dedicated a lot of their time to talking about “news” regarding the elusive Valve game.
What’s interesting, however, is that there doesn’t appear to be a first video. Sorting by oldest, I can only trace the origin of this series back to video #2, posted all the way back in November 2017 (when Clive was but a wee sprog compared to the bushy-faced YouTuber we see today).
However, in video #2001 above – in which there’s still no news about Half-Life 3 – we get a prediction from Clive. They (perhaps jokingly) believe that by the time they hit update 3333, they will be 33 years old. This puts us somewhere into 2028. Maybe this is a sign, Clive ponders, but it would be a mind-frick if Valve did announce a new game in the series at this point.
Also, shoutout to our own Paula for discovering that someone has been posting a comment under all of Clive’s HL3 update videos with the phrase: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” It seems everyone’s getting involved in this level of dedication, including Paula, who must have gone through more than enough videos to spot this pattern.
So, to conclude: there is still no news about Half-Life 3. We can assume that Clive has either been embroiled in their own gag and can’t back out now, or we’re witnessing the slipping away of sanity as we move further and further away from Half-Life 2‘s initial release date. You decide.
