Is Half-Life 3 Confirmed? Valve Composer Says “HLX” on Stage

No, Half-Life 3 hasn’t been announced. What happened is smaller and stranger: Valve composer Mike Morasky said “HLX” out loud at a public panel on October 21, 2026, and HLX is the name fans have long believed is the codename for the next Half-Life game.

The panel was GameSoundCon’s “Valve’s Approach to an Open and Flexible Audio Engine,” and the full recording is on Vimeo. Answering a question about how Source 2’s audio system is built, Morasky said that Deadlock and HLX each have their own version of HDR audio. The person next to him, sound designer David Feise, appeared to react right away. The moment was first flagged by Valve leaker Tyler McVicker, who posted the clip.

That’s everything that’s actually confirmed. Valve has never said what HLX is, and we haven’t seen a response from the company about the remark. Fans connect the name to a Half-Life game because it has turned up for years in datamined strings and files from Valve’s other games, so the panel is the first time we know of that someone at Valve has said it in public.

Morasky said it in passing, while explaining audio tech. He didn’t describe a game, a platform or a date, and “HLX has its own HDR” only tells you that a Valve project with that label has audio set up in Source 2. It doesn’t tell you which genre it is or whether the project is the one fans mean.

For example, the Vimeo recording shows a composer answering an audio question, not a studio teasing a game. The gap between “Valve staff use this label internally” and “a Half-Life game is coming” is the whole story here. A codename mention is real evidence that HLX exists as a project inside Valve, which the datamined files had already suggested, but it isn’t a release signal. HLX is the label fans use for the project, and nothing in the panel defines it. Valve announces on its own schedule (it ended Index VR production with a note on its Steam Hardware page, for instance), so the places to watch are the company’s Steam news and its official channels, not conference recordings.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report