Image credit: Valve

It's been 19 years since the release of Half-Life 2 : Episode 2, and yet the ceaseless clamour for a Valve game with a number '3' in its title continues. And following a swell of reports suggesting Half-Life 3 isn't just real, its development is well underway, a Valve developer has gone and sent the internet a-chatter all over again by publicly, albeit accidentally, referencing its codename during a livestream.

Valve's first attempt at releasing a Half-Life game with a '3' in its name would have been the ill-fated Half-Life 2: Episode 3 , which was abandoned - despite Valve previously announcing it as part of a planned trilogy - sometime around 2009.…