Gabe Newell Sends TVG A Piece Of Valve's ARG Puzzle [UPDATE] News

Over the past 24 hours, Valve's Gabe Newell has been sending out mysterious images to members of the gaming press as part of a larger Augmented Reality Game (ARG) puzzle.

Early this morning, Newell sent us a piece of the puzzle (shown right), which appeared to be part of a larger mosaic on this wiki page.

However, try as we might to fit the puzzle piece into one of the missing slots of the image shown, it just didn't appear to match up with any of the corresponding tiles. So, we pulled together some of the recently posted images and started a new mosaic using our image, and came up with the image shown left.

Although the image looks entirely different from the one on the wiki page, when we inverted the negative it appeared as part of the same bathysphere from the ARG's wiki page (shown below right).

The file name of our image was "bee torso crops", which has corresponding letters to the file names of images received by other sites such as "berrets or scoop" (HalfLife2.net). 'Reboot Process' appears to be the best guess for a possible anagram at this stage.

This follows a supposed leak of sci-fi concept art from Valve's offices earlier this week.

We'll keep this article updated as more info comes in...

Update: Joystiq has put forward the intriguing theory that this bathysphere, or diving bell, could be related to the Borealis, an Aperture Science sea vessel that was introduced in Half-Life 2: Episode Two and featured in initial concept art for Half-Life 2: Episode Three.

Further evidence comes from a reported Portal 2 achievement called 'Ship Overboard' that has the reference "Discover the missing experiment" and features a picture of an anchor cut from its rope.

Could Valve really be preparing to announce Half-Life 2: Episode Three via Portal 2? It's a long shot but not totally inconceivable.