An uncon­firmed report sur­faced yes­ter­day say­ing that Apple CEO Tim Cook was spot­ted at Valve’s head­quar­ters in Belle­vue, Wash­ing­ton. When­ever Cook is spot­ted out and about, peo­ple take notice. The CEO of the world’s most valu­able com­pany doesn’t per­son­ally visit other tech com­pa­nies to sim­ply have a chat.

Many spec­u­lated as to why Cook would be vis­it­ing Valve, maker of pop­u­lar game series like Half-Life, Team Fortress and Por­tal. Valve also boasts an incred­i­bly robust online PC gam­ing plat­form called Steam that oper­ates sim­i­larly to Apple’s App Store.

We’ve got­ten word that Cook was indeed at Valve yes­ter­day, and what’s more, Apple is plan­ning a full-on assault to take over the liv­ing room. This assault won’t just be lim­ited to the long-rumored Apple HDTV set, but will also include a rev­o­lu­tion­ary home con­sole as well.

Accord­ing to sources to Cult of Mac, Apple is work­ing on a tele­vi­sion set with an iTunes-integrated touch screen remote and Siri-like voice com­mand tech­nol­ogy. The TV set will be com­ing before the end of 2012. Rumors and patents have said as much for the past year, so that’s noth­ing new. But that’s not all we’ve heard.

Our sources also say that Apple’s tele­vi­sion set will come with an Apple-branded, Kinect-like video game con­sole. The inter­face will rely heav­ily on motion and touch controls.

If true, this wouldn’t be Cupertino’s first foray into the con­sole market.

Back in 1995, Apple col­lab­o­rated with Bandai to prod­uct a Mac OS run­ning home con­sole called the Bandai Pip­pin back in 1995. Things were pretty dis­jointed at Apple back then, and the com­pany was try­ing to regain its image under the lead­er­ship of Michael Spindler. Apple licensed the Pip­pin plat­form to Bandai for a con­sole, but the mar­ket was already dom­i­nated by the PlaySta­tion and Sega. The Pip­pin was priced too high to com­pete and Bandai ended up sell­ing less than 50,000 units before shelv­ing the project.

Back to Valve. The gam­ing com­pany makes Steam, a PC game dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work with 30 mil­lion active users on both the PC and Mac. Steam is to gam­ing as iTunes is to music. Recent rumors have sug­gested that Valve is work­ing on its own con­sole dubbed the “Steam Box.” Instead of another Xbox or PlaySta­tion, the hard­ware would serve as more of a stan­dard that Valve would license to part­ners, much like the way Google han­dles Android in the smart­phone space.

Recent Valve job list­ings also indi­cate that the com­pany is work­ing on a mys­te­ri­ous hard­ware project. The Steam Box is rumored to fea­ture bio­met­rics tech­nol­ogy in the form of a bracelet or wear­able device for rec­og­niz­ing players.

Last year Valve CEO Gabe Newell seemed con­cerned with Apple’s ‘walled gar­den’ approach and the pos­si­bil­ity of its entrance into the TV mar­ket. ”On the plat­form side, it’s sort of omi­nous that the world seems to be mov­ing away from open plat­forms,” Newell told The Seat­tle Times. ”They build a shiny sparkling thing that attracts users and then they con­trol people’s access to those things.”

Newell talked about “shiny sparkling things” again in a more recent inter­view a cou­ple months ago:

Well, if we have to sell hard­ware we will. We have no rea­son to believe we’re any good at it, it’s more we think that we need to con­tinue to have inno­va­tion and if the only way to get these kind of projects started is by us going and devel­op­ing and sell­ing the hard­ware directly then that’s what we’ll do. It’s def­i­nitely not the first thought that crosses our mind; we’d rather hard­ware peo­ple that are good at man­u­fac­tur­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing hard­ware do that. We think it’s impor­tant enough that if that’s what we end up hav­ing to do then that’s what we end up hav­ing to do.

If there’s any­one that’s good at man­u­fac­tur­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing hard­ware, it’s Apple. We don’t know the exact details of why Tim Cook met with Valve recently, but the two com­pa­nies are obvi­ously talk­ing to one another. Based on what we’ve heard, it’s pos­si­ble that Apple could be con­sid­er­ing Valve as a part­ner for its entrance into liv­ing room gaming.

We’ve reached out to both Valve and Apple for com­ment and will update this story if we receive a reply.

Update: After declin­ing to com­ment on this story, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has now said that Tim Cook never vis­ited his com­pany. Our sources have again reit­er­ated that Apple is con­tin­u­ing with its plans for a liv­ing room gam­ing pres­ence regard­less of Valve involvement.