Gabe Newell ponders the future in new Half-Life 2 documentary: ‘I think that Half-Life represents a tool we have and promises made to customers’

To celebrate Half-Life 2’s 20th anniversary, Valve dropped a few surprises in our lap on Friday afternoon, like putting together the original dev team to record in-game commentary for the legendary FPS, which is free for the weekend on Steam. Awesome! Valve also posted a two-hour documentary on the making of Half-Life 2 on YouTube. Also awesome—unless you had something else to watch tonight like a ridiculous boxing match.

Personally, I’m less interested in the development of a 20-year-old game I know like the back of my hand as I am in some hints about what might come next for Half-Life. So, I did the thing you do when you just can’t wait to find out who done it in a whodunnit: I skipped to the end.

Is there confirmation of Half-Life 3 in the Half-Life 2 documentary? Or confirmation of Half-Life: Alyx 2? Or confirmation of anything specific at all? No. But in the closing minutes of the documentary, there are some hints that the Half-Life saga isn’t over.

“It was easy to think about VR being a vehicle for Half-Life because that was a big technological innovation and kind of a core reason for that product’s existence,” said Valve engineer Brian Jacobson. “And I think one of the things we have internally tended to attach to the Half-Life IP is innovation. Gameplay innovation is often enabled by technological innovation. Clearly there was a ton in Half-Life 1 and 2.

“It’s an interesting challenge moving forward to think about what that means for future Half-Life stuff, for sure,” Jacobson added.

Future Half-Life stuff confirmed? I mean, sorta, though Jacobson is implying that more Half-Life won’t happen until more technological innovation is done.

Over to you, Gabe Newell:

“The ending of Half-Life: Alyx is somewhat a self-critical realization,” said Gabe. “I think that Half-Life represents a tool we have and promises made to customers to capitalize on innovation and opportunities to build game experiences that haven’t been involved previously. And I think there are no shortage of those opportunities facing us as an industry right now.”

Look, I know GabeN is a beloved industry figure but at times he talks like a business cyborg. What does that word salad mean? At the end of Half-Life: Alyx we briefly get to inhabit the boots of Gordon Freeman again for a few seconds, and a portion of the history of Half-Life is changed due to a bit of spacetime G-Man magic. I’m not sure how that adds up to a self-critical realization, honestly.

But it does seem like Gabe is saying something along the same lines as Jacobson did: Half-Life and technological innovations go hand in hand, and you won’t get one without the other.

What those innovations might be, I’m not sure: more advanced VR? More powerful GPUs? A Steam Deck you control with a neural implant? Whatever breakthrough needs to happen, I hope it happens soon. Otherwise, see you at the Half-Life 2 25th anniversary party for some more speculation.