Last year Valve released The Steam Discovery Update. Looking back on it, they say that the update has done marvels.

The year was 2005 (you know it’s gotten bad when even 2005 has a quaint and nostalgic ring to it), and the first episode of a little Half-Life 2 mod series charmingly titled MINERVA: Metastasis was released. Metastasis itself only represented the first chapter in a planned MINERVA trilogy (the next chapter, Out of Time, never materialized, though creator Adam Foster isn’t afraid to hint at a possible return in the future), and it was a sequel to Foster’s earlier Half-Life 1 release, Someplace Else. Through exceptional level design, an intriguing narrative and remarkably well-paced gameplay, MINERVA was universally acclaimed and praised not just within the Half-Life community, but all around the greater gaming world.

The Metastasis “trilogy within a trilogy” concluded with the release of the last two episodes in October of 2007, and a year later, Foster began working at Valve, on a strange little game we used to call Half-Life 2: Episode Three. Since then, he’s done significant design work on Portal 2 (and god knows what that means about the aforementioned title), and presumably neglected little old MINERVA, which like many other HL2 mods, did not survive Valve’s May 2010 update for Mac support. Neglected, that is… until now!

Valve’s Jason Holtman tells GamesIndustry.biz about their plan to get more PC-to-Mac games on Steam, and more importantly, their plan to get more third-party developers using Steamworks, Valve’s free software suite that includes Steam’s community support, dev tools, online play and copy protection (the most recent and popular game to use Steamworks is, of course, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2). Hit the jump for the full story.