Half-Life 3 speculation reignited by Valve dev mentioning three sweet little rumored codenamey letters amid technical chat about video game noises

Wake up. There's Half-Life 3 chatter occurring again. This time because, about an hour into a panel about sounds in video games, a Valve composer has uttered three eyebrow-raising letters. HLX. In an industry rife with acronyms, what's so special about this one? Well, it's a rumoured codename for the next entry in the aforementioned series about a man with a crowbar, for one.

"Basically, that's one of the three pieces that come together to make HDR that you can easily optimise," Valve music designer Mike Morasky said during a panel at GameSoundCon, answering a regular old question about the techincal ins and out of managing sound in games. The panel had been running for about an hour when he said this, so clearly nothing that'd get people out of their seats was in the offing.

"In fact, I think Deadlock has their own version of HDR," he continued. "HLX has its own version, so on and so forth." AHA, voices screamed around the world. He said the thing. HLX, in case you're not on top of the list of acronyms that should set you off yapping about Valve games, previously appeared in a data string from a Counter-Strike 2 update and looks like it could turn out to be a codename for a future game from Gabe and co. That's going off Half-Life: Alyx's codename having been HLVR.

If it was HLXXX, I imagine one would have to assume it to be a possible codename for a Gordon Freeman sex tape or a Half-Life collaboration with Vin Diesel, star of the 2002 film XXX. I don't know about you, but either would excite me greatly.

Morasky's co-panelist David Feise doesn't look to have been subtle in sarcastically pointing out the former's slip of the tongue to him via some cheeky whispering while the two were still up in stage. Morasky also looks to have plenty of form for this sort of tongue slippage in relation to HLX.

Does any of this tell us anything other than potentially confirming once more that Half-Life 3 exists? No, but hey, it's something. One thing we do know is that ex-Valve writer Chet Faliszek has said that he wouldn't be interested in helping pen a Half-Life 3 if indeed one is hiding in the ether to catch out musicians whose mouths sometimes move faster than their brains (as happens to all of us).