With Half-Life 2: Episode 2 having been released just last year, it's a safe bet that we won't be seeing Gordon Freeman in a new game anytime soon. But just long will we have to wait? Well, according to Doug Lombardi, Valve's VP or marketing, it will be quite a while.

"The next time you play as Gordon will be longer than the distance between Half-Life 2 to Episode One, and Episode One to Episode Two," he told Kikizo. And as for releasing any news about the game, Lombardi teased, "We may at the very end of the year."

Using Lombardi's math, we can estimate that the third Half-Life 2 episode won't be ready until around 2010 (HL2 was released in 2004, while HL2:E2 didn't hit until last year). Valve is a developer that is infamous for it's long development cycles, but like most similar companies, is also renowned for its quality, so the wait shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Let's just hope that Episode 3 reaches the same level of quality that the previous games in the series did.