Gabe Newell confirms Half-Life 3?

It might be hard to imagine a world after Half-Life 2, but sooner or later (our money's on later), the game is going to ship to retailers, we're all going to play it, and life will return to normal. Even for Valve.

But of course life will not return to normal for Valve. The developer will have to worry about growing the game's technology to keep up with hardware innovations, patching it to fix the inevitable bugs (not a slight on Valve, you understand, just a fact of gaming life), and of course working on the sequel. What, you thought they'd stop?

It almost goes without saying these days that a big game needs an even bigger sequel - at least until it all comes tumbling down in a hail of fumbled financials and critical uproar (sorry Lara) - so it wasn't all that surprising this week when we started hearing talk of Half-Life 3.

According to Swedish games magazine Gamereactor, Valve CEO Gabe Newell himself recently admitted the game was in the planning stages during a press briefing at the developer's Seattle headquarters. Word from the Swedes is that Half-Life 2 NPC Alyx (the bird in the shots) could be a playable character this time, and that we'll learn more about the aliens we're shooting. Hope so. Obviously though with Half-Life 2 still a few months away from its current summer 2004 release target, we wouldn't expect to hear anything else about Half-Life 3 for a good few years. After all, how long did it take to hear anything about HL2?

Anyway, if your Swedish is better than ours (highly likely) then go ahead and take a look at the original Gamereactor piece, complete with a picture of Newell waggling his finger while clutching a copy of the magazine. Yep, we reckon that might become a recurring theme...