What would have changed if the HECU did not kill the scientist/security in Black Mesa?
Would the Black Ops team still be sent to Black Mesa? Could this change the outcome of the 7 hour war? Would Black Mesa be restored after the incident?
Comment below!
Here’s my take on this topic:
If the HECU wouldn’t have killed all (or close to all) Black Mesa personnel, they certainly wouldn’t have had a problem with Freeman. After all, Gordon killed hundreds of marines during his adventures in Black Mesa…
The 7 hour war would probably have happened anyway, but maybe it would have taken a few more minutes before earth surrendered. The Black Ops team wouldn’t have been sent to Black Mesa. They were sent in because the HECU weren’t clean enough - they were supposed to be a fast and effiecient clean-up crew to ensure there were no survivors to tell the tale of aliens invading earth. (It’s a government cover-up after all)
If the government (or whoever was behind the decision to kill everyone associated with Black Mesa) had given orders to escort the scientists, there simply wouldn’t have been a need to call in the Black Ops.
Black Mesa wouldn’t have been restored. I mean… the 7 hour war likely started soon after the Black Mesa incident. There are no exact dates regarding when exactly it happened (Valve is REALLY opaque about their games’ timelines), but I remember that Eli - towards the end of Episode 2 - saying “I should have aborted that damn test. The whole world went to hell that day.”
This implies that the 7 hour war indeed took place on the same day as the Resonance Cascade.
BUT, for the sake of… fun, really - let’s just imagine the 7 hour war took place later down the line: Black Mesa was heavily funded by the government. Do you really think that after a disaster like THAT the government still would have sent money to Black Mesa? The experiment would have severely damaged Black Mesa’s reputation. The government would have probably instead funded Aperture Science instead. Too bad they were busy completing work on an artificial intelligence that would shortly later kill them all with neurotoxin. Oops.
Interesting questions though, I’m digging these Half-Life lore related threads. Interested in what other people have to say.
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If the government originally planned to kill all scientists they could do it without a problem if they needed so.In 1998 we didn’t know the Administrator in person and his connection with Combines.Maybe in HL3 we will learn more about incident and if we speak about the government there are a lot of groups which weren’t interested obviously not in HECU nor Black Ops operations,but Apperture Science might be lobbied it and even sponsored the Black Ops assasins with their own equipment,maybe Breen was involved in those operations.
Regarding the 7 hour war of course the consequences would be different from what we had in HL2,at least think about the Mossman,Eli and Kleiner which invented close range teleportation,now think about the whole black mesa personell and I think we might got those technologies much earlier and therefore maybe we could win a 7hour war then.Also Xen could be under human controll and we would be more developed as a race with Xen and other alien worlds technologies than without them.Breen would be jailed for his mismanagement.
You know, I never really bought the “coverup” explanation for why the military was doing what it was doing, and I don’t think it actually has a lot of clear confirmation. We only hear about it in incontrovertible terms from two pieces of dialogue- one is from a scientist who says the military is “under orders to silence the facility”, and the other a soldier conversation line to the effect of “government coverups are not in my job description”. Note that neither of these people actually heard coverup orders from anyone in charge. The scientists were out of the loop to begin with, and the soldiers who use that line recognize Shepard on sight (meaning they were a part of his unit and never received official orders- heck, they probably heard the coverup thing from the scientists). The only other mention of what the military wants comes from the scientist at the end of WGH, and his statement “[the government’s] idea of containment is to kill everyone associated with the project” is more ambiguous- he doesn’t say exactly what is being contained, or why the military thinks killing people will help.
I think it’s much more likely that the military is killing Black Mesa personnel because they believe the Lambda Team’s efforts to stop the disaster are in fact going to make the problem worse or cause some other sort of damage, and possibly that the scientists deliberately did something wrong or illegal to kick it off in the first place. Maybe they weren’t trying to kill them all at the very first, they just disagreed over the proper solution to the problem and decided to enforce their side of the argument with superior firepower when the scientists wouldn’t back down. They also probably were trying to keep their operation secret (would you want to be accused of murdering hundreds of American citizens on American soil?), but I don’t think it was their only goal or even their primary one.
Here’s why I think this. While some of these sources are not canon to Black Mesa, I include them (highlighted) to establish a continuum of evidence following the idea of this explanation all through development):
One of the very first announcements you hear in WGH is one asking the science team to report topside for questioning, which is somewhat counter to the purposes of a coverup operation but does make sense if they are trying to understand the scope of the disaster or trying to figure out what to do, as well as indicating that the military are already suspicious of the scientists and believe they had a role in it. References to questioning the science team appear at the end of Apprehension and the beginning of Captive Freight as well, although sadly we never get to see exactly what questions the military wants answered.
Going back to the scientist at the end of WGH, his statement about containment makes just as much sense referring to the Xenian invasion as what’s being contained, not information about the facility.
There’s an odd synthesis of cut content from pre-HL1: there, it was originally planned for the security guards to side with the military, and a cut conversation begins with a guard claiming “this all happened because of you scientists”, and accusing them of having created the zombies or some other Xenian life form.
In OAR, aborting the launch of Black Mesa’s satellite rocket serves extremely little purpose from the point of view of a coverup. However, doing it is very important if the military believes the Lambda Team will make the problem worse.
In several areas in HL1’s OAR (and, IIRC, a few other places in that game), you can find military graffiti reading “Traiters die”[sic]. Why would the scientists be “traiters”? Because they caused the resonance cascade.
At the very end of OAR, a conversation between several Marines includes the line “Science Team? Do you think he was responsible? Sabotage, maybe?”. This seems to indicate that to the military in Black Mesa, being a part of the Science Team is evidence of guilt in the initiation of the Cascade.
Throughout the game, the military seems to be trying to preserve the infrastructure of the facility as much as possible, and only resort to airstrikes when an infantry action is clearly infeasible. If they were trying to cover things up, a regimen of immediate airstikes would make much more sense, since that would limit the number of people involved and their own direct exposure to the information they were supposed to be concealing. The fact that the military bothers to invade indicates to me that they want something with Black Mesa other than just its non-existance.
As a side note, I always thought that the HECU referred specifically to Shepard’s soldiers and not all of the Marines sent to Black Mesa- that would explain why they arrive later, why they have somewhat different equipment, and why they seem somewhat better able to survive in the facility than the regular grunts.
Actually, if you assume that the military were sent to help out Black Mesa crews and was able to contain the invasion, Black Mesa could be up and running again.
Imagine an accident happens at the Large Hadron Collider, some people dies, so we send out rescue crews to help people evacuate. We are not going to abandon the entire facility, though. That would be stupid. Abandoning an entire facility that costed a few billions euros and years to construct, and having been running without any problems for the past decade, that would cause more problem.
The military is seen to trying to preserve the facility, rather than to totally decimate it. This means that the government is interested in re-using the assets left at Black Mesa. After all, they’ve got fancy technologies like HEV suit or Tau/Gluon. It must have costed an enormous amounts of money and resource to build them. And they got one of literally the game changer of physics - teleportation technology! Who would have thought such would be possible? Einstein would reincarnate to see it and die again! And to destroy everything because of an accident? Quite a nonsense. The airstrike/nuke thing only came when things got too bad (FUBAR), which may have not happened if they didn’t kill everyone on sight.
Black Mesa has been running without any major problems for the past fifty years. They made many discoveries that could make a fortune out of it! From a client’s view, while it certainly would be damaging to the reputation like you said, it would be extremely stupid to just completely abandon everything. If the boards or the stockholders heard that the Black Mesa is shutting down forever just because of one accident happened, the company that had been delivering goods and rising profits for years? They will violentry rise up against the decision. Especially DOD - just imagine how much money they spend sorely on Black Mesa!
The facility itself of course would be shutting down for a while. But Black Mesa is undoubtly a profitable property, so they will invest to fix up and restore the facilities to get all the process working again.
Rather, it would be a good example that Black Mesa is well-able to handle such catastrophes. One of the things you have to consider when investing is the risk, especially if you are investing for a science lab where anything can go wrong. If Black Mesa is able to prove everyone that even in a dire scenario they are able to contain everything, it would be the living proof itself.
Of course, all of that assuming the world didn’t go hell that day. I mean what’s the point trying to make dough if there’s a bee shooting bodybuilders knocking at your doorstep?
But if the Combines were not involved, like it was mentioned in the Long Term Fate of a Xenian Invasion post, and to quote Freeman’s Mind,
Yeah, I don’t think xenians would stand a chance.
On the other hand, Government don’t seem to give any shit about Aperture Science. They are too much inefficient, and does things that the they didn’t even request. DOD certainly are not going to invest in Aperture even if Black Mesa went away. They’ll have to fix how the company works first.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. The thing is that the Resonance Cascade wasn’t just an isolated event, all throughout the world Bullsquids, Houndeyes, Headcrabs, Barnacles, the occasional Vortigaunt, and other Xenian creatures appeared. Eli could easily be refering to the fact that these new lifeforms were completely destructive of life in general on Earth, and especially destroyed the way Humans lived at the time. Besides, it doesn’t make any sense that the Combine would invade on the same day they had just taken over and established control of Xen, probably against still humongous resistance as even the previously enslaved Vortigaunts would realize that the Combine would just re-enslave them again. It would assuredly take at least a few weeks to subdue Xen, which is corroborated by the fact that the same process in which humans are transformed into Overwatch soldiers was the same as used to turn Vortigaunts into Combine soldiers. Everything to me points to the 7 hour war being at least a month after the Black Mesa incident.
And beside this, Alyx, at the beginning of EP2 when the first Portal Storm strikes from the now destroyed C17 Citadel she says that ,it’s… like the First Days all over again, , meaning that the 7HW didn’t take place until at least a couple of days or weeks after the BM Incident and the storms were a lot more frequent during that period. Moreover, killing Nihilanth likely de-stabilized the portals, turning everything from an isolated incident around the facility into a global one.
Also, ,Vortigaunts into Combine Soldiers, , mind if you explain this part? I’ve never seen this happening, nor heard about it, only humans into Overwatch forces.
The reason the HECU tries to kill all Black Mesa personell is because the HECU forces are in fact aliens in disguise.
They’re supposed to a military force trained for combat, but the security force of Black Mesa have better aim.
It’s the only logical explanation.
Supposedly the augments used to create the Overwatch Soldiers were originally used by the Combine to create soldiers out of Vortigaunts. I don’t remember where I got this from but I’m pretty sure it’s a part of the Half-Life universe.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.