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'Half-Life 3' may be made by fans in the Epistle 3 Game Jam

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Half-Life 3
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Taking what “Gertrude Fremont” suggested in Marc Laidlaw’s blog post and running with it, Half-Life fans around the world have come together to begin work on various interpretations of the final story in the original Half-Life saga. “Epistle 3 Jam,” as it’s called, is shining the Half-Life symbol into the sky with a call for everyone and anyone to help finish Gordon Freeman’s story once and for all.

For Half-Life fans, the last decade has been one filled with heartbreak, jokes, and disappointment as time and again it seemed Valve would fail to conclude the story it started back in the late ’90s. With former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw’s story, presented with gender-swapped names, they had somewhat of a written ending to the saga. Now some are looking to make it into a game, or rather a collection of them.

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The Epistle 3 Jam charges fans with crafting any sort of Half-Life game based on Laidlaw’s story elements, and gives them a couple of months to do so. It has no style restrictions and no artistic limitations, but asks that fans use Laidlaw’s story as the basis for whatever they come up with.

There are 48 people already signed up to help create some semblance of a Half-Life 3 conclusion and one person has already submitted an attempt. Called Mr Gordon 3, it’s a little more meta than the game jam creators were probably expecting. It has text complaints about the real-life Valve company floating steadily toward an actual Valve, which players must defend by turning them into harmless compliments before they get there.

Mr Gordon 3 Image used with permission by copyright holder

It’s a bit of silly fun but may be indicative of the kind of projects that come out of this game jam. Considering the time it’s taken Half-Life fans behind the Black Mesa modern remake to create that game, we shouldn’t expect a fully-fledged Half-Life 3 to materialize in the next few months. Especially considering there are so many elements of the story within Laidlaw’s original post that wouldn’t be particularly easy to interpret into a game. As he asked in some recent follow-up tweets, how do you even represent multiple timelines in a one-person shooter perspective?

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