Update: According to Deniz Sezen on the Black Mesa forums, the rumors about Black Mesa being ported to Source 2 are false: “Just to dispel a large rumor (and I know I’ll be viewed as the grinch that stole christmas): We are NOT on Source 2. It wouldn’t make sense for a company to license tech they haven’t proven yet with a released title to a mod team. Our [visual] however, WILL be improved. Don’t get me wrong though, we’d love a Source 2 license but our fans would be waiting another 9 years if we had to port again.”

Can’t say I didn’t warn ya.

Since I am sure many of you will have mixed feelings about the news mentioned in the title, I just want to make it clear right out of the gate that an updated Black Mesa will still be available for free and will be supported!!! Now, onto the details…

Like any story with its depth and complexity, the Half-Life series leaves a lot to the imagination. In fact, considering the latest installment’s cliffhanger, it leaves more to the imagination than anyone wants.

15 Years ago, on November 19th 1998, Valve released Half-Life.

What followed was an entire revolution in the gaming industry.

Half-Life redefined the FPS genre, it implemented rich storytelling, introduced new technologies and catalysed an entire platform for user-created content, all in one package.

A new generation of gaming was born.

Do you want to learn more about Half-Life? To see the obscure? To witness the oddities? Then you’ve come to the right playlist!

The ‘Half-Life Fact Files’ is a small project by Rikki D’Angelo or more well known to the Half-Life community as Marphitimus Blackimus (or Marphy Black for short).

Self-described as “an instalment in this series of Half-Life educational film strips”, the project is focused on exploring the outlandish knowledge, obscurities and fascinations that lie behind the very fabric of Half-Life.

It can be hard to keep track of things in the modding community. Unlike the multi-million dollar marketing campaigns of triple-A releases, us mappers have to rely on word-of-mouth or places like ModDB to have our creations discovered.

A result of this is that a lot of brilliant releases slip “under the radar” and fade into obscurity. To help rectify this, here is the first of what (we hope) will be a series of articles highlighting smaller maps and mods released recently which we think you should download and try out for yourself. They’re free!

Welcome to the first Community Spotlight on LambdaGeneration!

To start off, we have chosen a small project from the community known as “Half-Life Mobile”. As the name may suggest, the project is an attempt to bring Half-Life to the mobile platform.

It’s an amazing effort which combines the experience of Half-Life with the technical potential of the modern smartphone.

Hello and welcome to the first edition of Fanart Fridays! This is where we hope to showcase the awesome Fanart submitted by our dear readers and followers. And what do you know, we got some submissions to show off today, let’s jump to it!

The original Half-Life was first announced in early 1997, initially set for that year’s holiday season. But one very impressive E3 1997 showing later, and suddenly Half-Life was on everyone’s radar – expectations were ramping up, and suddenly, Valve were in the center of the gaming world’s attention. And so, later that year, close to their projected release date, Valve decided that a delay was in order. Once they’d attained it, a lot of the pressure was off, and the team at Valve spent began to intensely evaluate every aspect of the game, and all of the content they had created in one year of development.

And while there had been a considerable amount of progress, and the game itself was in very good shape, it just seemed like there was something missing – as Valve engineer Ken Birdwell stated in The Final Hours of Half-Life, the game simply wouldn’t have gone “over the edge anywhere“. To Valve, it seemed like Half-Life could be a lot more revolutionary and a lot more groundbreaking. Thus, in late 1997, an entire game’s worth of content and design was completely scrapped, and Half-Life underwent a complete redesign, fully from the ground up.

What gamers eventually got one year later in November of 1998, amounts to an entirely new game (in fact, according to Ken Birdwell, it really is a Half-Life 2 of sorts). But what happened to the Half-Life that never was – the “Half-Life 0” that Valve unceremoniously threw out the door?

This is a review/critique of Black Mesa: Source (a free fan-made remake of Half-Life), co-written by Mimaz (co-host of the Steamchat Podcast) and Vic (previous lead editor of LambdaGeneration).

Black Mesa is a difficult game to judge.

Update: This article has been updated with further information on the upcoming first release of Black Mesa: Source. Check it all out, within!

You may or may not know that the work I do, especially here, tends to demand some pretty crazy late night hours of me. Consequently, I might sleep in worse than Gordon Freeman himself (after all, we can all imagine why he was late for that faithful experiment).

And sometimes, it so happens that the universe itself will directly conspire against my sleepy ways.

Like now.