Details surface on Junction Point (Warren Spector)'s cancelled Half-Life project

Over at Game Informer, there's an interview with Warren Spector shedding some interesting light on a cancelled Half-Life project that his defunct company Junction Point was developing sometime between 2005 and 2007. We first learned about this in 2013.

In the interests of readability and because Game Informer like blocking vast swaths of the world from reading their website, I've attached the important bits here:

http://ift.tt/1OR5LXf

Quote:

"We were doing some concept development for [Valve] for a year, maybe even two. [...] We were working on an episode," Spector says. "[Valve] was really into episodic content at that point. We were working on an episode that would fill in one of the gaps in the Half-Life story. So we were trying to flesh out a specific part of the world of Half-Life and we created a new tool. A thing we elegantly called the Magnet Gun, which I still wish they would do something with. We came up with so many cool ways to use a magnet gun that were completely different from anything [Valve] had done and was really freeform in its use. I still think it'd be cool, but when the deal with Disney really started to bear fruit, I just couldn't say no to Disney. I'd always wanted to work there, so we never completed the work with Valve." [...] We asked if this means we can essentially blame Mickey Mouse for preventing another episode of Half-Life 2 from coming out. [...] "Maybe," Spector says with a laugh. "I think Valve was rethinking their episodic plan, anyway. When you have the opportunity to work with the most recognizable icon on planet Earth, anybody who says no to that is nuts. It was fairly iterative. [Valve] left us alone more than we expected. We were working on... I don't know how much I can say about this even now. But what are they going to do, say 'You'll never work in the games business again?'"

Details surface on Junction Point (Warren Spector)'s cancelled Half-Life project