What is "Project White Sands"?
It's that time again. A leak, this time via the résumé of a videogame voice actor, has led to another rumor that Valve is working on a new Half-Life game.
The voice actor in question, who has credits in games like Starfield, Fallout 76, Valorant, Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, and Call of Duty: Vanguard, listed "Project White Sands" as a Valve game they'd worked on, with a release date TBA. Someone on the Gaming Leaks and Rumours subreddit spotted it, and now we're off to the races one more time.
While previous leaks have established Valve has a multiplayer shooter in the works called Deadlock, that was codenamed Citadel and later Neon Prime. The codename "White Sands" does resonate with Half-Life's Black Mesa, and is the name of a NASA testing facility and a missile range in New Mexico. (It was the missile range where the first atomic bomb test detonation took place in 1945.)
We last heard rumblings of a new Half-Life game back in February, when data strings found in a Counter-Strike 2 update hinted at the existence of two projects in development at Valve. One was the previously mentioned Citadel, which evolved into Deadlock, while the other appeared with the initials "hlx". It was suggested that might refer to something as underwhelming from our point of view as a cross-play version of Half-Life: Alyx for PSVR2, but where Half-Life is concerned, hope springs eternal.
Redditors reacted to the leak with the usual mix of cynicism and desperation, with replies like "HL3 copium is back boys", "Half Life hero shooter", and "fuck it, I'm putting my clown makeup back on."
