A codenamed Valve project found in a voice actor's résumé has Half-Life fans putting on the clown makeup yet again

(Image credit: Valve)

It's that time again. A leak, this time via the résumé of a videogame voice actor, has led to another rumor that Valve is working on a new Half-Life game.

The voice actor in question, who has credits in games like Starfield, Fallout 76, Valorant, Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, and Call of Duty: Vanguard, listed "Project White Sands" as a Valve game they'd worked on, with a release date TBA. Someone on the Gaming Leaks and Rumours subreddit spotted it, and now we're off to the races one more time.

While previous leaks have established Valve has a multiplayer shooter in the works called Deadlock, that was codenamed Citadel and later Neon Prime. The codename "White Sands" does resonate with Half-Life's Black Mesa, and is the name of a NASA testing facility and a missile range in New Mexico. (It was the missile range where the first atomic bomb test detonation took place in 1945.)

We last heard rumblings of a new Half-Life game back in February, when data strings found in a Counter-Strike 2 update hinted at the existence of two projects in development at Valve. One was the previously mentioned Citadel, which evolved into Deadlock, while the other appeared with the initials "hlx". It was suggested that might refer to something as underwhelming from our point of view as a cross-play version of Half-Life: Alyx for PSVR2, but where Half-Life is concerned, hope springs eternal.

Redditors reacted to the leak with the usual mix of cynicism and desperation, with replies like "HL3 copium is back boys", "Half Life hero shooter", and "fuck it, I'm putting my clown makeup back on."

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.