Half-Life 2, Valve’s magnum opus, was released in 2004. Continuing the story that began in 1997’s Half-Life, the sequel made history for the company, and the industry at large, because it introduced the public to Source, Valve’s in-house game engine. Featuring impressive leaps forward in lighting and animation, a robust physics system (one of the first in games), and a full suite of modding tools, Source soon became the technical foundation of Valve’s work in the industry going forward.
It was that last one—the modabilty of the Source engine—that players truly embraced. The Half-Life 2 fan community rapidly became a hub for a vast, robust scene of modders, folks who produced incredible games like Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable—both of which would eventually get ported to different game engines and released as stand-alone titles, and both of which had a huge impact on the future of gaming. Another of those projects was Black Mesa, an attempt to rebuild the original Half-Life in its entirety for the Source engine. Not a simple port, like Valve had done with its poorly received Half-Life: Source, but a remake, one that leveraged the strengths of the Source engine to make that original game new again.
The Black Mesa project began around 2005 as a collaboration between a couple of modding groups with the same idea. In 2006, the group, which started as a 13-person team that eventually became known as the the Crowbar Collective, got down t
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