During a recent developer panel dedicated to video game audio, veteran Valve composer Mike Morasky mentioned two of the company’s games while answering a question: Deadlock and “HLX.” The problem: one of them, HLX, is not the name of any officially announced Valve game, but instead is believed by fans to be the internal, non-public codename for the yet-to-be-announced Half-Life 3. Oops! On October 21, as discovered by veteran Valve reporter Tyler McVicker during GameSoundCon, Valve sound designers David Feise and Carlye Nyte were part of a panel about how sound and music work in Source 2. Also part of that panel was Mike Morasky. And when asked about Source 2’s open, flexible sound system and how it connects to other parts of the engine, Morasky casually said this: “And actually, I think Deadlock has its own version of HDR. You know, HLX has its own version, and so on.” Unless you’re someone who’s been following Valve’s last few years of data mining and leaks, you’ll have no idea what HLX is because the company hasn’t officially announced it, teased it, or even hinted at it. Fans only know about HLX thanks to over five years of data mining other Valve games to get updates on the progress of what is supposedly the next main entry in the Half-Life series and believed to be Half-Life 3. So hearing a Valve employee casually say “HLX” on stage in front of people and cameras is a little wild. And it seems Morasky wasn’t meant to say HLX on stage, as right afterward Feise, the man next to him, can be heard apparently sarcastically whispering, “Good job.” Oh! Valve should have been prepared for Morasky to spill the beans, however, as he previously slipped up and mentioned working on more than one Half-Life game, which is strange since he’s only officially credited with working on Half-Life: Alyx in 2020. At this point, though, I can’t blame Morasky for just saying HLX outright. The codename has been floating around online for years; Fans have put together an entire dashboard cataloging everything we know about the game and how it works (which is a lot), and many in the community openly reference HLX in forums and messages. I imagine Morasky simply forgot that HLX is not actually a publicly announced Valve project. I’m guessing Valve will ignore this incident, or maybe Mike or someone else will try to suggest that he was talking about Half-Life: Alyx and got it wrong. But at this point, it seems very likely that HLX, aka Half-Life 3, is so far along in development and has been around for so many years that you simply forgot it was still a secret. In 2025, McVicker reported that HLX is playable from start to finish, so the game is much further along than I think some might imagine. Could Half-Life 3 be announced later this year? All eyes will be on the Game Awards in December. After all, Valve owes Geoff a trailer.
