Just a quick FYI: this photo, featuring Gabe Newell showing off two of his knives (which are, actually, the same knives from early CS:GO builds shown off at various game expos) has been making the rounds… but not in its original, unedited form. There is a photoshopped version that places “Half-Life 3” text on the black screen behind Gabe, as if to imply Gabe had started HL3 moments before taking this photograph. You might have seen it. Needless to say, that is a complete fake. The original, unedited image first popped up in this Facepunch thread.
We’ve actually gotten in contact with the photoshopped version’s creator: Gothic, who confirmed that he originally made it as a joke and did not intend for it to go viral – as it did, largely due to a lack of research from larger gaming sites who unwittingly passed the story on. While the increase in various Half-Life hints and references since December is a fact that is hard to dispute, I don’t think Gabe would go and do this. I’ve gotten loads of messages regarding this whole thing. Don’t be fooled! If there’s something real, you can expect to hear about it right here.
I saw this on the front page of Reddit’s gaming subreddit, so whoever posted it there is probably the person who got it viral.
Unfortunately it seems that a lot of gaming websites already knew it was a fake and posted it anyway for traffic. Luckily I frequent a Valve news website that would never stoop to that level: Valvenews.net!
I’m totally kidding. LambdaGeneration above all.
Vic, thank you so much. I don’t know what i would do without lambda Generation, it’s the Valve knews, but you guys actually care about as much as i do.
How stupid are people in general? Why would Gabe take a picture of himself with the Half-Life TITLE SCREEN (I just want to point out that this would be the title screen, most likely) running in the background? If anything, it should’ve been more unique than that, like some random in-game material that we’ve never seen before. Now THAT would’ve been something of great interest…
For anyone wondering, here’s the shopped version: http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/3605/spv2y.jpg
It’s so convincing.
Some more info:
Gabe already has a creepily large knife collection (over a hundred), as seen in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2X7KRt1hg#t=2m28s
The picture was taken by a custom knife maker, who supplied the knives to Gabe, and whose son started the Facepunch thread.
Thanks for clearing that up, Vic. I left it off my blog because of how goddamn far-fetched it seemed. Kudos to the news sites that actually do the research before posting things. It only sucks because somewhere on that computer’s files…. EP3 lurks in shadow…
So if it is fake… why publish?
To clear up the issue and make sure more people know that it’s a fake.