What this means in practice is that Black Mesa tells the same story with a lot more fidelity. Different parts of it have been playable for years, but last week Black Mesa's developer Crowbar Collective started beta testing the 1.0 release of the game, meaning the entire thing is playable, beginning to end, including the game's last chapter, Xen, which takes place on an alien world.

Black Mesa's ambitions were so exciting when I first saw a trailer for it in the 2000s that I decided I wouldn't play it until the entire thing was finished.

It's not just a bunch of high resolution textures, but a meticulous recreation of a long, complex, and beloved game in a more recent engine, with a few embellishments.

'Black Mesa' Is Not the 'Half-Life' You Remember “It's more like Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho than the cleaned-up and 'digitally remastered' release of Star Wars.

We think this upcoming 1.0 release is the best, most polished, and most fun version of the game yet.'” 'Through luck, hard work, and maybe a bit of ignorance, we didn't shy away from our goal of bringing this game to completion,' said project lead Adam Engels in a blog post celebrating the 1.0 release. Eventually, after a couple of betas and some stress testing by players, the full Xen chapter was released on December 24, 2019, which brings us to now and the full release of version 1.0. At this point, the Xen sections were still a work in progress, but Black Mesa's Early Access release allowed for valuable feedback and bug testing from the community. The game then launched in Steam Early Access on May 5, 2015. With full access to the latest version of the Source engine, and the ability to earn money from the project after working as volunteers for so many years, Crowbar Collective agreed. Black Mesa was one of the first games to be voted on by fans and approved by Valve as part of the program, and soon after Valve approached the team about releasing Black Mesa as a commercial project.

Black Mesa, The Ambitious Fan Remake Of Half-Life, Has Finally Hit Version 1.0 “Black Mesa's initial launch in 2012 also coincided with the introduction of Valve's Steam Greenlight program, which allowed users to vote for games to be added to Steam's storefront.

Black mesa transit system