Fans of the silent, mustachioed hero Gordon Freeman will probably be very happy and very sad reading this.
Way, way back in 1998, we got our first taste of the world of Half-Life series, as we controlled Doctor Freeman around a huge scientific research facility, where a test on teleportation goes very, very wrong, and the entire facility is swarmed with beings from another dimension.
It was followed by Half-Life 2 in 2004, which was set 20 years after the first game, and again you controlled Freeman, this time as part of a rebellion group who are trying to regain control of Earth from the aliens who have now pretty much taken over.
Then came Half-Life 2: Episode One in 2006 and Episode Two in 2007, which ended in something of a massive cliffhanger, with the good guys blowing up the portal to the other world, but effectively trapping the aliens here on Earth with us.
Clip via EWCutScenes
Cut to ten years later, and we still don’t have a Half-Life 3 or a Half-Life 2: Episode 3 or whatever they want to name the intended sequel, and fans were beginning to lose hope that one would ever arrive.
Out of nowhere, Marc Laidlaw, a former writer for Valve (the creators of the Half-Life games, as well as Portal, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead and others) who had worked on the scripts for all previous Half-Life games posted on his personal website a short story simple titled ‘Epistle 3’.
It is told from the perspective of Gertrude Fremont (who is definitely not a gender swapped Gordon Freeman), his companion Alex Vaunt (definitely not to be confused with Alyx Vance from the games), as they journey to a lost ship known as the Hyperborea (not to be confused with Half-Life 2’s lost ship Borealis), and their fight against a sinister alien force known as the Disparate (which just so happens to sound like the exact opposite of Half-Life’s sinister alien force known as the Combine – what a coincidence!).
If you’re a fan of the series, then you owe it to yourself to read the full short story here, but we will show the ending provided by Gertrude, who may be writing for her own perspective, or it may be Marc Laidlaw himself going a little meta following his separation from Valve:
Enough time has passed that few remember me, or what I was saying when last I spoke, or what precisely we hoped to accomplish. At this point, the resistance will have failed or succeeded, no thanks to me. Old friends have been silenced, or fallen by the wayside. I no longer know or recognise most members of the research team, though I believe the spirit of rebellion still persists. I expect you know better than I the appropriate course of action, and I leave you to it. Expect no further correspondence from me regarding these matters; this is my final epistle.
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