TITLE
The Sad, Strange End to Half-Life
AUTHOR
John Brindle
PUBLICATION
Waypoint: Games By Vice
YEAR
2017
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
So this is how it ends. After two games, four expansion packs, numerous mods and spin-offs, and ten years of near silence, the saga of Half-Life and its protagonist Gordon Freeman finally concluded last week with an unofficial blog post from the series’ former lead writer Marc Laidlaw that received so much traffic most people had to read it on Pastebin.Writing on his personal website, Laidlaw sketches out would probably have been the story of the long-awaited Half-Life 2: Episode 3. He picks straight up from the last game’s cruel cliffhanger, describing the player’s journey into the Arctic in search of a lost ship called the Borealis. He makes a minor pretense of covering his tracks, swapping the characters’ gender and scrambling their names. But most Half-Life fans will recognize it instantly, and realize what it means.
It’s been almost a decade since Valve last touched the series that made it famous. Since then it has evolved from a mere game developer into a global gaming hegemon through its ubiquitous online distribution platform, Steam. In those years it has commented only in the most elliptical fashion about whether the threads it left dangling in 2007 will ever be tied up. So Laidlaw’s post seems to confirm what many people already suspected when he left Valve last year: they won’t.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Valve
GAMES MENTIONED
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 3
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Marc Laidlaw
TOPICS MENTIONED
Canceled Games
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive