The only problem with this, is that it doesn’t seem like you read the second half of the final sentence in the article: “1998 - [snip]
… Days later, that race is lost when Black Mesa successfully deploys an interdimensional gate through which an alien race emerges and effectively ends the outside world.”
They’re not talking about the race to portal technology being lost (well, I guess they are, but not in a slow, casual way,) they’re talking about the Resonance Cascade itself. Putting the cascade itself in 1998 would conflict with Gordon’s employment letter from the game’s instruction manual, which is dated 200X, since Gordon kind of has to be there to make the cascade happen, so Ajax brings up a valid point.
Don’t get me wrong, Black Mesa may very well have been secretly experimenting with primitive portal technology, or going back and fourth to and from Xen, long before Gordon was ever hired, but if this new timeline info is correct, that would place such primitive portal technology experimentation way before the year 1998, not in the 2+ year span from 1998 to 200X. Of course, even if Black Mesa was able to portal successfully prior to 1998, this wouldn’t have ended the race between Aperture and Black Mesa, since the folks at Aperture would have no way of knowing what stage Black Mesa was at in their research, as the research wouldn’t have been released, and the technology not yet given to the government, (assuming that was their ultimate goal, anyway). Thus, the race to win whatever top secret contract they were most likely both working towards would have still been going strong, and that final sentence from the article would still be correct.
