Where the hell is the next Half-Life game? That's what two Vancouver-based Valve fans wanted to know when they set up shop opposite the headquarters of the people criminally late on shipping Half-Life 2: Episode Three. Valve founder Gabe Newell met with those "protesters" to deliver them good news and bad.
Newell told Kotaku at Gamescom that Valve's first public protest by a couple of "very nice" Canadians ended peacefully, even though the cops showed up.
"They wanted to know when Episode Three was coming out," Gabe said of his run-in with two diehard Half-Life fans. "I said 'I can't tell you.' And they were, like, 'Okay…'" (Kotaku asked Newell the same question. He said "I got nothing for you.")
But it wasn't a total loss for the protesters.
"We asked them how many sodas they had," Newell said. "They only had two, so we sent them some sodas and some pizza." The group also got a tour of Valve's offices and some hands-on time with Dota 2. "We needed people to test," he explained.
"We were worried," Newell said of the cardboard-wielding micro-mob. "The cops showed up after someone else in the building called the police. He rode up on his Segway, but it turns out [the cop] was a big Half-Life fan. So he completely understood where they were coming from and didn't chase them off."
While the Half-Life 3 fans' protest may not have gotten us any closer to details on the further adventures of Gordon Freeman, they at least made an impression on Valve's co-founder.
"They stayed for two days. We miss them."
Image credit: Jason Sussman
You can contact Michael McWhertor, the author of this post, at mike@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.