There's been plenty of hubbub the last few months about Half-Life 3, with tons of hints pointing toward a possible announcement at E3 this year. Rumors about the game are nothing new, though; we've been holding our breath since 2007 for the series to finally be concluded. In a wonderful interview with Penny Arcade's Ben Kuchera, Valve CEO Gabe Newell touches on why exactly it's taking them so long to reveal the game.
"We’re acutely aware of how much we annoy our fans and it’s pretty frustrating to us when we put them into that situation. We try to go as fast as we can and we try to pick the things that we think are going to be most valuable to our customers and if there’s some magic way we can get more work done in a day then we’d love to hear about it, but we recognize that it’s been a long time whereas we have so many games that people really love–Counterstrike, Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead, not a whole lot of Ricochet enthusiasts out there, and at the same time we want to be making sure that those games and those stories and those characters are moving forward while also making sure that we don’t just get into terminal sequelitis.
"Part of the reason that we backed off talking so much about what was happening in the future is that when we’ve done that in the past, you know, with Half Life 1 it was a year after we originally said it would be, Half Life 2 basically if you go and read the forum posts apparently took us fifty or sixty years to get done so we’re trying to be careful not to get people too excited and then have to go and disappoint them. So we’re sort of reacting in the other direction and saying “okay, well let’s have things a little more baked before we start getting people all excited about it.”
We see his point. The whole interview is great, and they touch on everything from wearable computers to ownership of digital games. Newell even talks about his favorite tablet. Controversial! Go read it and give us your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter.
