After arguably an excruciatingly long time in development, the Half-Life remake Black Mesa is at long last ready to launch in its final version out of Early Access early next month. Interested gamers should consider purchasing the game before that though since once it leaves Early Access, the base price gets increased.
The history of Black Mesa is almost as long and illustrious as Half-Life itself. The ambitious remake started out as a small community mod way back in the middle of the last decade. Over the many years, the modding team grew into a proper indie developer and established itself as the Crowbar Collective.
In March 2006, two of my college classmates got onto the Black Mesa mod team. I applied as an artist, and they more or less vouched for me. The team “hired” me without even completing an art test. From there I became the art lead, a partner in the new “Crowbar Collective LLC”, project lead, and eventually owner of the company.
As I write this, I am realizing that we plan to FINISH Black Mesa exactly 14 years to the month from when I first joined the team. 14 years working on a single project, with a dedicated team, that had a vision, and saw it through.
But only in 2012 did the first playable version of the remake get released. It was all that fans of the iconic shooter were hoping for. Meticulous attention to detail and a noticeable jump of fidelity over the 1998 Half-Life once again boosted the interest in Black Mesa. Throughout the years, the developers had to adapt to newer feature sets of the Source Engine which only led to a longer development period.
At long last, in 2015, Black Mesa came out as a paid Early Access title on Steam. Only five years later, and we are at the brink of the game finally reaching the elusive Version 1.0. After reaching feature completion a couple of months ago, the developers went on to give the remake a final visual overhaul, once again improving what was already a great-looking game.
