Valve's trio of hardware announcements revived my Half-Life 3 fever dream

Yesterday, Valve announced three (3) hardware products: a Steam Machine console, an accompanying Steam Controller and the long-rumored Steam Frame VR headset. This hardware, along with the excellent Steam Deck, gives Valve a pretty comprehensive way to get people playing games wherever they want, on any sort of screen. And, of course, the games are what this is all about. Steam’s catalog is impossibly vast, encompassing every genre you can imagine — but there’s still one crucial title missing from the thousands of games available.

I am, of course, talking about Half-Life 3.

I swore back in 2017 that I’d stop beating this dead horse, but Valve sucked me back in with the utterly unexpected, excellent, VR-only Half-Life: Alyx prequel. At the very least, it was a sign that the Half-Life universe wasn’t dead and buried in Valve’s ...