Valve CEO Gabe Newell surprised everyone by agreeing to an Ask Me Anything session with the r/The_Gaben subreddit, and that AMA was immediately flooded with questions, racking up more than 4,000 comments in the first five minutes.

The most shocking element of the AMA itself, though, is that Newell responded actually to a question about Half-Life 3, specifically its rumored cancelation. The question: "An unidentified anonymous source at Valve has said that Half Life 3 is cancelled [sic]. Is that source legitimate?"

To the surprise of everyone, Newell responded, "I personally believe all unidentified anonymous sources on the Internet."

To get you up to speed, GameInformer recently made headlines for reportedly trying to reach more than 100 Valve employees before getting one person to respond, who stated that Half-Life 3 wasn't even on Valve's radar. Newell seemed to shrug off this report, but stopped short of saying anything about the game's status. Even in that same response, he said "the number 3 must not be said,"

This wasn't the only time Newell responded to a question about Half-Life. When asked what his favorite Valve games were, he said Portal 2 was the best single-player game and Dota 2 was the best multiplayer game. When a Reddit user responded asking why Half-Life wasn't included, Newell said this:

Since he was so involved in the game, it's easy to see how he maybe wanted to do a few things earlier. Newell later elaborated that "everything ends up being a set of trade-offs. Anything in a game is a sacrifice of things not in a game. I just feel more personally about Half-Life for a bunch of reasons."

He did, however, confirm that a JJ Abrams-directed Half-Life and Portal movies are still in the works, as Abrams also did in late 2016, simply saying "Yep. They're coming."