Saber Interactive scored a pretty major license with its adaptation of World War Z, which released earlier this year, but the studio previously had its sights set significantly higher. On Half-Life 2, to be precise.

In an interview with GameWatcher, studio CEO and co-founder Matthew Kirch said the studio reached out to Valve with the intention of re-making the iconic first-person shooter. Kirch says “I reached out to Gabe Newell personally, because I knew him from a past life, and I said I want to remake Half-Life 2. That’s all I want to do. I won’t charge you anything for it. I’ll do it for [revenue]-share and [it] doesn’t even need to be a big rev-share. I just really want to do it because I love that game so much.”

Unfortunately for Kirch (and the rest of the FPS community) the response to his query came back negative. He says that Valve’s response was that “sorry, if we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it internally.” Sadly, it would still seem that that’s a pretty big ‘if’.

The developer’s position is a shame, particularly given that Half-Life 2 is starting to show its age more and more, but I can’t say I’m particularly surprised. Given the hype around anything related to Half-Life 3, I doubt Valve would want to take any risks around its prequel.

That said, Half-Life remake Black Mesa is still in development, and that’s not coming from a shooter-focused studio, but a collection of fans who spent many years working on a volunteer basis. All we need now is an actual release. And for Valve to finally do something with Half-Life. Hey, E3’s only just around the corner – time for another few weeks of wishful thinking?