There is no launch date for Black Mesa right now

Jan 28, 2016 12:28 GMT  ·  By

Black Mesa is a remake of the original Half-Life with modern technology, and it's been in the works for a long time. Developers are promising that Linux and Mac OS X versions are planned.

Half-Life is arguably one of the best games ever made and it was released back in 1998. In a couple more years, we're going to celebrate 20 years since its launch, but this game is still being mentioned almost two decades later. It put Valve on the map, and it redefined the FPS genre.

One of the things that really made a difference for Half-Life was the support for mods. There are hundreds of them, and they expanded the universe in more ways than we can count. There were a couple of official ones, but not made by Valve. In any case, it's easy to see why some people would want to remake the original game with newer technology.

The efforts to remake the original Half-Life with the newer Source engine that was used in Half-Life 2 started roughly in 2004 when two sets of developers realized that they were working on the same stuff. The Black Mesa project was founded.

Black Mesa is no longer vaporware

Initially started as an overhaul of the original game, the project grew a lot more. The launch date was constantly pushed back, and the project even entered a sort of hiatus for a couple of years. A semi-completed version of Black Mesa was eventually released for free, but then the developers took the project to Steam Early Access in order to finish the work.

"We're working on Ports to Mac and Linux, but these things take time as each OS is a different environment, and the game runs differently! There're different bugs for each one that'll we'll have to sort out, etc. Don't worry, we are working on it, but no timeline yet," developers wrote on the Steam forums.

The project is about 85% finished, or so the makers of Black Mesa are saying, but the fact that it's available on Steam Early Access means that it's easier to track its progress.

Black Mesa is currently discounted on Steam with 50%.

Photo Gallery (13 Images)

Black Mesa gameplay
Black Mesa gameplayBlack Mesa gameplay
+10more