This is it. Valve, developers of Half-Life and Half-Life 2 have officially filed Half-Life 3 for trademark in Europe. Forum NeoGAF were the first to pick up on this, and posted a screengrab of the trademark filing. Usually, mega-boring stuff like this slips under the radar but when Half-Life 3 is involved, every little rumour and confirmation helps. And this is as legal and telling as it gets.
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You can even do it yourself, young padawan. Go to The Trademark and Designs Registrations office of the European Union’s main site, type in “Half-Life 3” by “trademark name” and watch as it spits out the above image. It’s almost too good to be true.
The last Half-Life game, Half-Life 2: Episode Two released 10 October 2007, so that’s a full six years we’ve been waiting for either Episode 3 or the now trademarked Half-Life 3. We’ll take the latter.
The original Half-Life 2 was released back in 2004, so we could also say that we’ve waited almost ten years to see a proper follow up. When you’re dealing with the best first-person shooter of all time (no arguments there), it’s expected that emotions would run high.
As Polygon points out, the last confirmed piece of Half-Life news is that Fringe creator J.J. Abrams has begun development on both a Portal and Half-Life film. But no flashy film (filled with obvious lens-flare) is preferable to an actual game.
And there’s more! Forbes points out (via NeoGAF forums again) that Half-Life 3 is in active development at Valve. The NeoGAF user managed to grab a screenshot of Valves internal bug tracker app which lists a “Half-Life 3” and “Half Life 3 Core Group”. The bug trackers app is offline now, but the screenshot is real. It’s happening, and it’s being worked on right now. 2014 is going to be the year of Half-Life 3, we feel it in our crowbars.
Rain on the parade
Eurogamer kind of ruins the celebrations by saying that the trademarking could just be a “safety precaution” against others using the name Half-Life 3. It also says to not expect any Half-Life 3 news for awhile, but we’ve got our positive hats on.
Image: 55Laney69 via Flickr.
