During a recent developer panel dedicated to video game audio, longtime Valve composer Mike Morasky mentioned two of the company’s games while answering a question: Deadlock and “HLX.” The problem: One of those, HLX, is not the name of any officially announced Valve game, but rather 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 spotted by longtime 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 a question about Source 2’s open and flexible sound system and how it connects with other parts of the engine, Morasky casually said this:
“And in fact, I think Deadlock has their own version of HDR. You know, HLX has its own version, so on and so forth.”
Unless you are someone who has been following the last few years of Valve datamining and leaks, you’ll have no idea what HLX is because it hasn’t been officially announced, teased, or even hinted at by the company at all. Fans only know about HLX thanks to over five years of datamining other Valve games for updates on the progress of what is reportedly the next mainline entry in the Half-Life series and which is believed to be Half-Life 3. So hearing a Valve employee just casually say “HLX” on stage in front of people and cameras is kind of wild.
And it seems Morasky wasn’t meant to say HLX on stage, as right afterward you can hear Feise, the man next to him, seemingly whisper sarcastically: “Nice work.” Whoopsie! Valve should have been prepared for Morasky to spill the beans, though, as he has previously slipped up and mentioned working on more than one Half-Life game, which is odd, as 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 openly. The codename has been floating around online for years; fans have put together a full board 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 can imagine that Morasky just sort of forgot that HLX isn’t actually a publicly announced Valve project.
I assume Valve will either ignore this incident, or perhaps Mike or someone else will try to suggest he was talking about Half-Life: Alyx and misspoke. But at this point, it seems very likely that HLX, aka Half-Life 3, is just so far along in development and has been around for so many years that he just forgot it was still a secret. In 2025, McVicker reported that HLX is playable from start to end, so the game is much further along than I think some might realize.
Could Half-Life 3 be announced later this year? All eyes will be on the Game Awards in December. Valve does owe Geoff a trailer, after all.