After a day of rumours, Gabe Newell, managing director of games developer Valve Software, confirmed that source code from the upcoming 3D game Half-life 2 was leaked onto the internet yesterday.
In a post on the Halflife2.net forums (www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10692), Newell described how he believed computers at Valve had been systematically hacked and been the target of denial of service attacks over the last few weeks, resulting in a copy of the Half-life 2 source tree being copied, and then released on the net.
As a part of his post, Newell issued an appeal to the loyal Half-life 2 community for help.
“What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to: helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details.”
Half-life 2 is the highly anticipated sequel to the 1998 game, Half-life, which was one of the biggest award winning PC games of all time. Half-life 2 was due for launch late in September, but has recently had its shipping date pushed back to before Christmas this year.
Tim Dean is editor of PC Authority magazine.