Cautious Hooray: Half-Life 3 Being Actively Developed?

There is a thing called Jira that Valve uses for project management. Everything they do is tracked on it, and last night it accidentally went public and OHMYGOD THERE’S A HALF-LIFE 3 TEAM ON IT! No Ricochet 2 team, however.

It’s the second indication in as many days that suggests Valve has decided to focus on Gordon’s journey, following the discovery of a trademark registration. The list has a core of ten developers (called “Half-Life 3 Core, that has Minerva modder Adam Foster, Counter-Strike’s Jesse Cliffe and others, as well as a further 46 in the “Half-Life 3” group. I borrowed some fingers and toes in the RPS Forbidden Chatroom of Mystery and came up with 56 developers. All those eyes and minds and fingers and elbows probably modelling crowbars as you read this.

It’s telling that I heard about an internal list of Half-Life 3 developers being discovered and immediately thought it was the beginnings of an ARG. Valve has gotten so good at manipulating me into seeing hints everywhere that a genuine flub on their network sent me on a scouring of forums to see if anyone had discovered hidden treasures and fun secrets. There is nothing, only the realisation that there is a team at Valve working on Half-Life 3, and that we don’t have a week of puzzles to solve. It’s almost disappointing.

Via NeoGaf.