Although Spector’s concept never came to fruition, he credits Gabe Newell’s company for keeping Junction Point alive for so long.

Half-Life 2: Episode 3. This never materialized, nor did anything regarding Valve and number three. However, Gabe Newell had big plans for not only a third episode, but a fourth! Several studios were working on it, but the first of them was Junction Point. It was founded in 2004 by Warren Spector, the father of the evergreen simulators (System Shock, BioShock…). Spector and Junction Point worked in vain on Half-Life: nothing ever came of it…

“I guess they were expecting faster progress than we were able to deliver. It was a bit frustrating, if you want to know the truth. We were just figuring out how their tools worked, what we could do with them, and what we wanted to do with them when they shut down the project. I’ll be forever grateful to Valve for keeping us alive during a very difficult time for the studio. We couldn’t have done it without them,” Spector told Jeremy Peel. The interview was about an immersive simulator that we’ll be hearing more about in December.

This episode of Half-Life would have taken place in Ravenholm, one of Half-Life 2’s most iconic locations, and it wouldn’t have been the last time a canceled episode would focus on the haunted area. Valve and Junction Point parted ways, and the studio was later acquired by Disney. At that point, they created Epic Mickey and its sequel, and then shut it down in 2013. (Epic Mickey recently got a new version.)

A year after Junction Point, Valve started working with Arkane (Dishonored, Prey, Redfall…) on a fourth episode that would have taken place in Ravenholm again, but this project was also cancelled by Valve in 2007. We learned more about it in a documentary by NoClip in 2020, and then we got to see an hour of footage from the project.

Spector and Half-Life could have been an excellent combination…

Source: PCGamer