A Red Letter Day

What an exciting turn of events. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve been following Black Mesa (formerly Black Mesa Source) for roughly five years now. Now that’s a long time! To put it into perspective — I was a Sophmore in High School when I started following this mod! (and now I’m old..er)

Black Mesa has been in development for many, many years now, with a lot of you guys feeling like a mod this ambitious would never see the light of day. Looks like you were wrong, because there is now officially a countdown timer on their website, counting down until the release of the first part of the Black Mesa mod.

Yes I did say first part. The mod technically isn’t finished, which means there’s a caveat. When the countdown hits zero, we will be free to play up through Chapter 14 of Half-Life, with chapters 15 through 18 being locked still.

What is Black Mesa you ask? Black Mesa is a total recreation of the 1998 FPS Classic, Half-Life. The dev team for Black Mesa has taken many years of their life and put it into painstakingly recreating the title on the Source Engine (Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Half-Life 2). This is no mere port of the title to the new engine (*cough* Valve *cough*). They have recreated everything from the maps, animations, character models, all the way down to the voice acting, sound effects, and music. Simply put, this is one of the, if not the, most ambitious mods ever started and actually finished. The only other mod that comes to mind with this much time and effort put into it is Nehrim for Oblivion (I may have missed some, and I apologize).

Even with the mod being only partially done, I am so freaking excited. Playing through the original Half-Life as a small boy is still one of my most fond memories growing up. You see, as some kids grew up playing Nintendo and Sega, I grew up playing the PC, which makes it all the more meaningful to get a piece of my childhood back all fresh and new again.

You can visit the Black Mesa website here. Something cool to note, is if you click the fold up in the upper right hand corner, you can read the response letter to Gordon Freeman, letting him know that they appreciate him accepting the position at Black Mesa, and look forward to working with him.

-UPDATE- The Black Mesa development team is now trying to get all of us to help them get Black Mesa on Steam. What needs to happen, is they need everybody to vote for Black Mesa via Steam Greenlight. If they reach the goal that is set (whatever that may be) we can actually make this game not only easier for the dev team to distribute to us, but also put us all in a position to enjoy all of the finer things that Steam has to offer like Achievement Tracking, Multiplayer aspects and more! You can cast your vote here. Every vote counts. At this point they’ve reached 15% of the votes needed.

Stay tuned for a partial review for a partial mod once Black Mesa finally becomes available to the public.

Until then folks, stay chipper. For soon, the Red Letter Day will be among us.