Valve veteran imperiously scorns reports that it's secretly finished Half-Life 3 and moving devs to other projects: 'They've been done for months! They just sit on the game! They're just relaxing!'

It's not like the Half-Life 3 rumour mill ever went away, but over the past few years the tinfoil hats have been a-twitching more than ever. If it's not one thing, it's another: the anniversary of Half-Life 2, the latest mention of "HLX" (speculated to be an internal codename) in the Steam backend or, my personal favourite, a spike in pizza deliveries near Valve's offices.

People will glom onto anything and everything that seems to be even tangentially related to Half-Life 3, and the latest rumour doing the rounds was no exception.