There’s a particularly grueling, though amusing, achievement you could get in Valve’s Half Life 2: Episode 2. Hidden under a platform at the start of the game; there’s an unassuming red-cheeked garden gnome. If players brought it all the way to the end of the game, and stuck it into the rocket meant to shut down the alien Combine antagonists’ operations, you’d meet the requirements for “Little Rocket Man,” which less than 5% of Steam players have achieved. Gnome Chomsky, as the little lawn ornament is called as a nod to political commentator Noam Chomsky, actually left orbit in real, non-invaded Earth as well. Back in 2020, around the release of Half Life: Alyx, space agency Rocket Lab partnered with Valve and Weta Workshop to send a model of the gnome into space as a part of a charity event. And every viewer of the launch’s livestream (seen below) would equal $1 donated by Valve CEO Gabe Newell to a hospital in New Zealand. Well, amidst the buzz around the possible announcement of Valve’s next entry to the Half-Life series, although seemingly unrelated, Rocket Lab has moved its previously scheduled launch of a research satellite to the date of the upcoming Game Awards on December 12th.

The upcoming launch from Rocket Lab is called “Raise and Shine”–which could also be an allusion to the famous first words of G-Man in Half-life 2–and will be available to watch here on launch day. This news has some on X speculating that Valve may once again be planning another collaboration with the space agency, although according to one Reddit user who supposedly emailed Rocket Lab, they allegedly deny the launch’s association with the franchise. This doesn’t amount to any sort of official confirmation or message from the company however, and it should be noted as well that originally the launch was scheduled for December 9th, but the company delayed it to “allow time for additional checkouts,” which casts some doubt at the possibility of any relation to the timing of The Game Awards. Regardless of the validity of this speculation, however, it is fun to think about the time a prop from a niche easter-egg in Half-Life 2 made it all the way to space. And it might be worth checking out the livestream of Rocket Labs’ launch anyway, for science!