Ten years ago, Black Mesa made its first in a series of momentous releases. A decade later and Crowbar Collective stands at the forefront of the modding scene, a testament to the true power of modders! To celebrate, here's another five mods that bring the whole thing full circle, and a little look back at Black Mesa's ten years of history!
Black Mesa: Blue Shift
Initially developed and released by Gearbox Software in 2001, second Half-Life add-on, Half-Life: Blue Shift is a return to the Black Mesa Research Facility and another look at the Incident's consequences from the eyes of Gordon Freeman's best friend - Barney Calhoun. This is where HECU Collective comes in, who are developing Black Mesa: Blue Shift - a free remake with use of Black Mesa resources and style. Staying as close to the original Blue Shift and Black Mesa as possible, the mod will be releasing partially, chapter by chapter, so those who are not patient for the full release will have something to play!
BMS Classic
By KyuuGryphon
Run. Think. Shoot. Live. Source. BMS Classic is a game-wide modification of Black Mesa that aims to revert some of the changes made in the 1.0 and 1.5 updates, as well as fix various bugs and oversights, improve performance, and reimplement missing setpieces and sequences from the original Half-Life - removing self-locking doors, allowing the player to backtrack and explore at their own leisure, restoring puzzles, rebalancing combat and supplies, and more.
Hazard Course
By PSR Digital
Developed by PSR Digital, Hazard Course is an addon for Black Mesa centered around a completely new take on Half-Life's training level, Hazard Course, featuring 6 maps, a wealth of new models and textures, an expanded introduction and outro sequence (based on the sequence exclusive to the PS2 version of Half-Life), and tons of new dialogue from the entire Black Mesa voice cast.
Escaping Black Mesa
By danys007
You are Ron Kerryson, a certified hazard course individual who has passed not long ago. You are also part of the Sector-E Biodome Complex team, mainly specializing in investigating potentially hazardous aliens which are volatile. One day, everything changed. The Resonance Cascade happened and much chaos evolved in your laboratory; you decided to take your HEV suit and hide in the custodial closet of the laboratory. When you emerge, the facility is in chaos, and surviving is your choice...or not.
Further Data
By ChrisBryant
Further Data is a brand new take on Half-Life: Uplink - Valve's demo of Half-Life- featuring new maps, new voice lines, and miscellaneous assets. Uplink is a piece of interesting Half-Life content in that very little of that demo actually appears in the final game, and it has been a relative gold mine of additional in-development content for Half-Life as many assets are different from the retail release as well. Further Data joins other contemporaries in translating Half-Life's expanded content into Black Mesa's more refined foundation.
Ten Years Of Cascades
Almost twenty years ago, on January 1st 2005, a mod called Black Mesa was launched on ModDB, hoping to tackle the newly-available Source Engine and bring to the community a remake of Valve's iconic Half-Life on the newest tech available. It took seven years of hard development, but on September 14th 2012, they made their first release - giving fans a look at what Half-Life: Source should have been. Releasing during the post-Episode 2 Half-Life drought, it was considered by some one of the best ways to introduce new players to Half-Life, and went on to be adopted by Valve as an honourable mention in their Half-Life catalogue on Steam.
One of the first pieces of Black Mesa media on ModDB dates all the way back to 2005,
showing a very different picture of what we would one day get from the team
Remaking The Source Material
Following the runaway success of the non-commercial version, a new release in 2015 made the game paid and expanded its features, now covering all of Gordon's Earth-based odyssey in Half-Life. Xen remained absent for a further five years until in 2020, the 1.0 release of Black Mesa made landfall and we went deep into the oft-discussed alien realm to destroy the Nihilanth and end the first invasion of Earth. Painting a wholly unique and creative picture of the borderworld, Xen was much awaited, has been much loved, and was the capper on a remarkable legacy for this household name in the world of modding.
Black Mesa's illustration of Xen differs wildly from the original, but turns up
the alien factor to eleven in providing a world truly different from our own
A Defining Achievement
Few mods can own the claim to fame that Black Mesa has - releasing a mod at all is no easy feat, but going commercial and then going on to spawn success from that move is something only a few other legends can attest to. Crowbar Collective remains together now as an independent developer with their own ambitions beyond Half-Life, but it has been the pleasure of ModDB to be one of the homes of this defining classic for over a decade, and we can't wait to see what these developers do next! You can catch up with them on a newly-formed social media page hosted by one of ModDB's partners, LambdaGeneration, here!
Can't believe it's been a solid 10 years since it launched. To think we only got the release date Confirmation a month prior in August 2012 with the On a Rail teaser video! It was so surreal!
Mate I'm seeing you everywhere, and I like it.
If only we had such a good remakes as Black Mesa for some of the old games! It's a marvel we have Black Mesa in the first place. So many years in the work just by fans with a professional final result!
Happy 10th anniversary. Never stop to let the community felt so alive today. A truly defining achievement. Wishes, the expansion pack of remake such as Operation Black Mesa can be even greater than this. Then, it will be something else.
Singaporean