http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/BlackMesa

— Inbound "Morning, Mister Freeman. Looks like you're runnin' late..."

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Black Mesa is a Fan Remake of Half Life 1 by the Crowbar Collective (formerly known as the Black Mesa Development Team), beginning life as a total conversion mod for Half-Life 2 shortly after the latter's release in 2004.

The game's first public release came in September 2012. With Valve's blessing, a retail version of Black Mesa was made available on Steam in May 2015 as an Early Access title, which added advanced graphics technology and multiplayer. This also marked the cessation of development for the freeware version, though it remains available for download.

Following seven years of development since the mod's first public release, four of which were spent in Steam Early Access, the final four single-player chapters constituting the events set in Xen were gradually made available for early beta-testing over the second half of 2019, with their full integration occurring on December 24th. On February 12th of 2020, the final beta updates were pushed to the public, with the full, final 1.0 release on March 5th.

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The time put into developing the game certainly shows: each level has been updated and expanded, with the entirety of Xen having been redesigned from the ground up; characters behave in a more realistic and, in the case of enemies, challenging manner thanks to improved animations and AI enhancements; and the combination of numerous graphical enhancements and greatly increased environmental detail grants the game a level of visual fidelity that regularly matches and even surpasses that of many modern game releases.

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Black Mesa provides examples of: