"Half-Life 3" is basically a gaming in-joke at this point- a game so long-awaited and that's got so many fans excited that the gamer community is basically burnt out. Any "Half-Life 3" news is met with the most extreme skepticism; it's more or less assumed at this point that Valve and Gabe Newell have gone on to do different things and that a few "Half-Life 3" ideas are collecting dust in some back corned of Valve's offices.

Well, just in case there was still some tiny portion of your brain holding out hope, here's a spark of "Half-Life 3" interest. Is it an official confirmation? Not quite- but it's by far the best we've had in a long time.

The news comes from Christian Today, who's just published a piece about the in-development game. They're claiming that a former employee at Valve, Minh Lee, had seen a drawing board with a number of pieces of concept art for the upcoming "Left 4 Dead 3," and then a few pieces of "Half-Life 3" artwork beside it.

There's been concept art for "Half-LIfe 3" before- the picture above is one such example- but this is the first we've heard in years about new art.

Franchise Herald adds to the story, claiming that the art may just be leftover from that first period when concept art was still coming out, and that gamers are assuming there will not be a "Half-LIife 3" for at least the next few years.

However, there's one other ray of hope- Valve founder Gabe Newell, who spoke about staying true to those "Half-Life" fans in the Washington Post:

"But we definitely in a sense have an army of customers who are always helping us stay honest. That's way better. We've essentially crowd-sourced supervision of a lot of these decisions to our customers and it works way better than almost any other system we could design. They're rabid, they're passionate, and there are a lot of them."

Check back soon for the latest "Half-Life 3" news.