Avid Valve fan and collector David McGreavy just shared a vast trove of unseen concept art for Half-Life 2: Episode Three and other unreleased Valve projects as part of its efforts to preserve this history for the future.
Over a decade ago, Valve began releasing smaller episodic sequels to 2004 is a cult half-life 2. These shorter, standalone games continued the story of Gordon Freeman and the human resistance to interdimensional invaders, the idea was that Valve could do that develop and release faster. 15 years after the publication of episode two, this plan does not seem to have worked, and the long-awaited third installment will probably never see the light of day. But at least we have these never-before-seen pieces of concept art to stare at while wondering what could have been.
David McGreavy is a Senior Producer at 2K, but in his spare time he collects Valve merchandise, artwork, and other odds and ends. He has amassed one of the largest Valve collections I know of, and has sources among current and former Valve employees, allowing him to gain access to things not normally available to the general public. A few months ago he teased
Now, he’s finally releasing some of the first scansand while not entirely happy with the quality, he has nevertheless agreed to share the artwork with him my box and helped explain what’s what. According to McGreavy, the art came from a former Valve employee who wanted to “downsize” his collection of swag and other Valve-related artifacts.
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The most interesting work of art for half-life Fans is probably the concept art of half-life 2 villain dr Breen as an alien worm. That plot point – that once human Breen died, he would be turned into an alien worm Half-Life 2—was first introduced in Marc Laidlaw’s “letter 3.” That was a rough draft of a plot Laidlaw released in 2017 that showed something episode three
Other artwork published by McGreavy includes more concept art for Half-Life 2: Episode Threeshowing a devastated shoreline covered in rusting boats and debris.
Interestingly, McGreavy told me that two artworks depicting Dog and Alyx are not off episode three, but were part of a short-lived attempt to build a game around these two, from which it would have seemingly been separate episode three or half-life 3.
Also of note is some concept art for the never-released space game that Valve was working on at the time blood stars. While we’ve learned a bit more about this project over the years, it still remains a mystery as to what it would have been and how far Valve got with it. Just an unfinished project that needs to be scrapped.
while we have seen some concept art from episode three in the past, it’s still nice to see more of what could have been. We know Valve tried to do a lot half-life games after the release of the first two episodes and ahead of the VR-focused release of 2020 Half-Life: Alyx. Based on information that surfaced in 2020, Valve had at least four or five different ones half-life Projects of various sizes under development between 2010 and 2017.
So it makes sense that there must be more concept art for all these different, canceled games that might be buried in old hard drives or boxes in Valve’s basement. And hopefully fans and collectors like McGreavy can help bring more of this stuff out of the shadows and preserve it for the future. Fans might not have to wait too long for more as McGreavy tells me he has more half-life Concept art to share. In fact, he claims he’s only released about half of what he’s got his hands on so far.
“I’m a lover of physical goods,” McGreavy said. “But I’m really striving to digitally preserve, catalog and inventory all of Valve’s retail and employee/internal items as much as I can.”
