On New Year’s Eve, actor and musician Mike Shapiro posted a cryptic video in the voice of Half-Life’s G-Man, teasing “unexpected surprises”. He captioned this tweet with the hashtags Half-Life and 2025, following a year of unprecedented leaks and rumours for something known only as “HLX”.
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The community immediately combed through every single aspect of his tweet, hoping to find a hidden clue about the ever-elusive Half-Life 3. They quickly came across a few notable details, enough for many to theorise that Valve has started an ARG.
What Is An ARG?
Before we look over the evidence found so far, let’s quickly run through what an ARG is.
It stands for ‘Alternate Reality Game’, and is essentially an interactive mystery, often designed to market something. Portal 2 was teased in a similar fashion through radio transmissions and a hidden countdown to the game’s announcement.
Whether Mike Shapiro’s tweet really is an ARG is unclear right now. These could just be coincidences, so it’s worth taking everything we talk about here with a grain of salt. With that said, let’s look at the discoveries made so far.
197 Appears Three Times
Mike Shapiro’s narration was accompanied by obscured visuals lifted from his new song, Best Long Dog.
If you look at the windows of the cover art, you can make out what appears to be the number ‘197’. This is significant because Best Long Dog is 3 minutes and 17 seconds long, ie 197 seconds, and it was released 197 days after his song Magnetic North.
Fans speculate that 197 is a reference to the isotope Au-197, or gold. This could be a nod to the GoldSrc engine.
That means the number 197 appears a potential three times. Reddit user Xenosaber20 pointed out that Valve has 196 posts on Twitter, speculating that its next post could potentially be the announcement of Half-Life 3 (the same way it revealed Alyx), or another part of the ARG. But in actuality, that post would be a retweet of a Steam OS update.
Another theory is that 197 is a date, July 19. Supporting this idea, if you place clock hands on 1, 9, and 7, you form a lambda symbol, and Au-197 is the only gold isotope with no half-life. Valve also renamed the iconic Popdog hallway in the Counter-Strike 2 map de_train to “Longdog,” and there’s even graffiti of a long dog wearing a crown. But that’s not the only clue fans think CS2 is hiding.
Every Clock On De_Train Is Set To 2:23
Another of Shapiro’s songs, Steeplechase, was released 223 days before Best Long Dog. Interestingly, Steeplechase is 223 seconds long, and Best Long Dog is played in a 223hz key. It appears to be a significant number, like 197, but what really ties it to the Half-Life 3 mystery is that every clock on de_train is set to 2:23.
Like 197, it’s both a prime and a Chen prime number, but its significance is unclear.
A Chen prime number is a prime number that, if you add two to it, gets you either another prime, or a number that can be made by adding two prime numbers together.
There’s no compelling theory like the 196 Twitter posts from Valve yet. Could it be as simple as a date, ie February 23? We’ll just have to wait and see, unless a more concrete suggestion is made.
Portal Connections
Assuming that the length of each song is important, there’s one more to look at — Magnetic North. It’s 234 seconds long, but that’s the only appearance of the number that has been found so far.
This could be a reference to Portal protagonist Chell as her test subject number was believed to be 234, given that it’s the number on her bed in the Relaxation Vault. But, as broken down by the HLX ARG Investigation, the Lab Rat comic revealed that she is actually test subject 1498.
However, some fans argue that the lyrics of Magnetic North might reference Chell anyway. Shapiro talks of a woman who “holds her tongue”, and unlike Gordon Freeman, Chell is canonically nonverbal. He also says in the song that “Her smile belongs to someone who’s been there and back, and there again”, which could be alluding to her escaping Aperture Science only to return.
Portal will inevitably be important to the plot of Half-Life 3, as various cancelled iterations of the game and even spin-offs featured the Borealis teased at the end of Episode Two, an interdimensional ship designed by Aperture Science.
de_train even features an out-of-bounds Portal easter egg with a graph comparing V-Corp products to “Aperture Labs” ones.
But whether these lyrics are actually a nod to Chell and Portal isn’t clear, and they could easily just be a case of fans making connections to fit another song into the puzzle.
Lambda At Magnetic North
We’re not done with this song yet, however. If you enter the Magnetic North coordinates from 2020, when Alyx launched, into Google Maps, you’ll see the above satellite image.
As fans point out, you can spot what looks to be a lambda symbol, ie the Half-Life logo. But this is probably just a case of our pattern-hungry brains trying to connect unrelated dots, so I’m inclined to believe this is a coincidence.
The entire point of an ARG is to offer a mystery that can be solved, and what does this tell us exactly? This feels more like seeing a face on Mars than anything else.
These Are Probably Just Coincidences
Mike Shapiro’s tweet was definitely a tease for something. The hashtags, G-Man voice, and vague nod to “unexpected surprises” even felt like a nod to Half-Life 3 being announced in 2025. But it might not be as intricate as an ARG.
The Magnetic North connections feel like a stretch, and 223 could just be a strange coincidence. 197 was the most promising lead by far, especially with Valve only having 196 posts on Twitter, but that has now been debunked.
The Portal 2 ARG was far more obvious, with several updates to the original that added radio transmissions and even clues to an announcement countdown, not to mention the involvement of other games like Killing Floor. The supposed evidence found from Shapiro’s music is a lot more cryptic and feels closer to the similarly overcomplicated Grand Theft Auto 6 theories that were likewise dead ends. Valve might finally announce Half-Life 3 this year (Jason Schreier speculated as much), but Shapiro’s tweet doesn’t appear to be part of any bigger mystery.
