Gamertell

Ever since fans reached Half-Life 2: Episode Two‘s rather shocking conclusion when the game launched as part of The Orange Box last year (October 10, 2007), the subject of the third and possibly final installment in the episodic first-person shooter series has been one of many a fervent discussion.

Valve is renowned for its long development times — something its supporters have generally come to accept as a fair concession for consistently high quality titles — but that didn’t stop the company’s vice president of marketing, Doug Lombardi, from dropping some hints about when we might finally see the conclusion to Gordon Freeman’s epic tale.

Speaking in an interview with Kikizo, Lombardi revealed that the “next time you play as Gordon will be longer than the distance between HL2 to Ep1, and Ep1 to Ep2.”

For the record, the gap between Half-Life 2 (November 16, 2004) and Episode One (June 1, 2006) was around 19 months, while the gap between Episode One and Episode Two (October 10, 2007) was slightly longer than 17 months.

Taken literally, then, the earliest Episode Three is likely to appear in the wild is April or May 2009. As for a sneak peak before that time, Lombardi goes on to say that Valve “may [announce or show something] at the very end of the year” (2008).

Read [Kikizo] Via [Kotaku]