Black Mesa Finally Has A Release Date

Black Mesa, the fan-made remake of Half-Life that has been in development for forever in internet years, has finally been given a release date: September 14.

There is a bit of a catch, however. In a post on the Black Mesa forums, the team announced that the version that will be released on September 14 isn’t the full game: You’ll only be able to go up to the Lambda Core. Rather than holding the project off until Xen and the later levels were completed, the team decided to go ahead and release what they have. Considering that’s several hours of gameplay, there are no complaints here.

Black Mesa itself won’t cost you anything, but you will need to have at least one Source game on your computer. If you have Half-Life 2, any of the Left 4 Dead or Portal games, you should be good to go.

Black Mesa has been in development on and off since 2004. Rather than simply just upgrading the original Half-Life‘s textures, Black Mesa is a full-on remake; there are new models, new textures, and even all-new voice work.

The level of excitement for Black Mesa has been fairly high over the years despite the fact that not a whole lot was shown for long periods of time. I was starting to wonder if the remake would even come out, so I’m glad to see that it finally has a release date, even if it will only initially be most of the game.

For updates on the release, you can head over to the official Black Mesawebsite.