PC gamers love to joke about Half Life 3 never coming out so someone thought it would be a good idea to actually Kickstart it.
Beside the bloody obvious that you couldn’t actually get away with creating Half Life 3 without an army of Valve’s lawyers turning up at your door, it just seems a rather strange thing to even bother doing. So what was this all about?
A chap called Christopher James Butler created a Half Life 3 Kickstarter page looking for £1500 to develop the game but reading his update actually creating a game called Half Life 3 was never the intention.
The first update reads:
“As this has just been brought up the ’10 month’ timescale is not a delusion on our part. This is when we hope to deliver an alpha test for our backers in order for them to see our progress and have something back from the project. This will include some general movement and interaction play as well as previews for later graphics”
His second and final update tackles that rather important issue of actually legally being able to call it Half Life 3. Quite an important point that one.
“No we haven’t approached Valve about this, this will be released under a different name and concept but it will in-fact just be Half Life 3, we are naming it Half Life 3 at present just so fans know what we are actually doing rather than coming up with a new name game from the start that people are more likely to pass by not knowing what it actually is.”
Getting a game funded is not easy and this was probably not the brightest approach, naming it Half Life 3 then renaming it to something else later might have sucked a few people in. Perhaps a different name and the words “inspired by” would have been a better way to handle it.
Before you dash to pry open your wallet and throw all your money at this, the project is closed. After the potato salad crowdfunding stupidity in the past couple of weeks I wouldn’t have been surprised if Christopher would have actually raised the funds and then taken a nice holiday on the proceeds.
As far as the real Half Life 3 is concerned, only one man can decide its fate, only one man has the story locked away in his brain. One day it will happen. Really, it will you know.
