Is the Black Mesa website the Half-Life 3 teaser we’ve all been waiting for or an elaborate prank?

In the last few hours it has been blackmesa.com website launched which immediately made one think of some Half-Life 3 announcement coming soon. As you may know, Black Mesa is the name of the research base where much of the first episode takes place. That said, studying the site yields a number of interesting, if contradictory, pieces of information.

We specify that it is not a given that this is something related to Half-Life 3, since it could simply be a well-studied joke or something completely unrelated. Doing the whois of the domain does not provide information on who registered it, so It’s not even certain that it’s tied to Valve.

Lots of clues, no proof

In any case, the page features a countdown that will end on Monday, September 30, 2024. Reading some internal articles, it speaks instead of a real company based in Boston that deals with vaccines, but the texts do not lack references to Valve such as “Gabe, call us. You know where we are.” It just seems like the CEO is a big fan of the Half-Life series. (hence the name of the company).

However, in the HTML code of the site there are other direct references to Half-Life, such as “colum-content lambda-incident”, while many have noticed that the logo, although appearing different from the Black Mesa logo in the game, is actually the same one with an altered shape.

In short, what we can say for sure is that whoever created the site knows the Half-Life series well and perhaps played on possible misunderstandings to gain a bit of publicity.

In any case, according to some, Valve is not behind the site, but Crowbar Collective, the studio behind Black Mesa, the excellent remake of the first chapter that was so successful in recent years. Just a few days ago they published a teaser video whose subject is still unclear.

As you can see in the video, the focus is on four colors that fans have immediately linked to the Half-Life series: orange for the first game, green for the Opposing Force expansion, blue for the Blue Shift expansion, and purple for the lesser-known expansion, Decay, available only for PlayStation 2. Tyler McVicker, who has been covering Valve news for years, believes that this is a completely new project.

In short, the mystery is really thick. We will see in the coming weeks if something more concrete will emerge. In the meantime, we can only speculate, hoping that Valve have suddenly learned to count to 3.