Valve, the developer of Half-Life, Portal and Left 4 Dead is apparently working on a new game engine, believed to be a follow-up to their existing Source engine.

Source 2

Speaking to game fans from the 4chan videogame forum, Valve president Gabe Newell explained that Valve had been working on "new engine stuff for a while now" and that the company was "just waiting for a game to roll it out with." Newell also confirmed that the engine was brand new.

A new Source engine was first discovered by ValveTime when the website discovered lines of code in the Source Filmmaker tool which alluded to a "Source 2." The exact code read:

"Return an str with the current engine version. If key doesn't doesn't exist, assume 'Source', otherwise invalid -- assume next-gen 'Source 2'.''

Fans met with Newell at Valve's headquarters on his 50th birthday, presenting him with a hat, a reference to Valve's Team Fortress 2 which controversially introduced an option to purchase hats for your character to wear.

The "game" that Newell refers to may be Half-Life 3, which has been speculated over since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 in 2007. Despite enormous amounts of speculation and anticipation surrounding a new Half-Life game, no solid information has been released by Valve.

The video which shows members of the 4chan forum meeting Newell has been made available online. As reported by Game Informer in August 2011, Gabe Newell met with "protestors", who were sitting outside of Valve's holding signs demanding Half-Life 3, and took both of them to lunch.