[Update] We received an official confirmation via an email from Valve's Doug Lombardi. It was short and to the point: "On the record: It's true." This certainly seems to be good news for both Church and Valve.

Original Story:

You may not have heard of Doug Church, but rest assured that he's had a major impact on our industry. At Looking Glass Studios, he helped create the System Shock and Thief (pictured) series. Later, he was involved with games such as Deus Ex and Tomb Raider: Legend. And now it looks like he may be joining up with triple-A developer Valve Software.

This unconfirmed news comes via a tweet from Irrational Games community manager Chris Remo, who said, "Doug Church going to Valve is one of the most exciting video game industry moves imaginable." Remo has since removed the tweet, but posted a couple of responses to followers suggesting that he had previous knowledge of the move: "I've been periodically checking the internet to see if it was announced, and today it appeared on Wikipedia."

Of course, it makes sense that Remo would have known about this in advance. Church worked at Looking Glass alongside Ken Levine, who now heads up Irrational Games.

We've reached out to Valve for confirmation of this news and will update this story if we hear back.