Must of been like late 2004. When my friend, Kalashnikov, was telling me he was creating the mod during a lunch break one day.
Joined Leak Free and posted there but after that’s demise i figured it was best to follow its progress by forgetting about it and coming back to check up on it from time to time.
So, i’m bored, and checking up…
i found it when i searched black mesa on youtube, hoping to see some gameplay of hl1 (that i didnt have at the time) and found this, then lurked for a year, and now ive registered.
I remember posting about this before. I remember reading about this Mod as soon as it was announced on a few game news sites back in 2004. I joined the forums just before it blew up. Since then I’ve watched it intermittently but didn’t get interested in it again until 2006/2007. I had an account on the gamernode forums and posted there a bunch. Now that I’m here, I seem to only post in threads that get deleted.
I ate the soul of my former best friend. Turns out souls read out in Binary, and he had tons of information about the girl he was stalking, a book he was writing (that I stole, and published myself later that day), and Black Mesa.
I’m grateful to him, for giving me these.
May he recover from his coma, as soon as possible.
That must have been a weird experience, eating your best friends soul and everything.
Anyway, I found it by my teacher actually. It’s funny how it happened, I was doing a report on a certain state(I got New Mexico), I looked up black mesa(to see if it was actually real) and first thing that popped up was black mesa source.com and i was all like OMG IMBD.
I found black mesa when I was searching for a better remake of half life 1 (better than the bullcrap “half life: source”) the first thing found was black mesa, and here am I.
I was interested in a remake for HL and I had found somebody had already started it. This was way back in the days of leakfree
One of three places, eventually all three: GameFaq’s HL2 forum (pre-gamespot merger and all that fun stuff); HLPlanet oh so long ago, or just a google search. I can’t exactly remember when all that I know was that it was still Leak-Free (The first one, I believe) and it was something like early 2005.
I found Black Mesa at my STEAM Community and ModDB.
On ModDB back when it was still two separate mods. (Half-Life: Black Mesa and Black Mesa Source, for the terminally clueless)
Crappy postcount aside, I’ve been following this since the beginning. 
Nice name Ram, I mean Virge.
I found out about this mod in games magazine. I was pretty surprised when I saw the article about a mod ( because they rarely write about mods… So far I only saw 2 articles on mods and BM was one of them, and I’m reading this magazine for 3+ years already ). The article was pretty big, but I still managed to force myself to read something about a mod because of the name “BLACK MESA: SOURCE” over the article ^_^. And… So there… Thats how I found out about this mod
TBH, what kind of gaming magazine (unless it’s a console gaming mag) doesn’t feature mod coverage generally? That’s completely ridiculous. For years the most played online FPS (Counter-Strike) was a mod, and that only stopped when Valve hired the mod team and made it an official product.
Pretty interesting
So far I only saw articles about BM: S and Natural Selection 2. I don’t know, maybe they used to write about mods, but not now. Its obvious why… There aren’t really big mods out there… Minor, but popular, that we see on moddb ( example: esf )… Its unneeded to write something about like that. This magazine is 60% games, 20% about personal computers, 10% junk and 10% online games . But never do they write srsly about mods 
. But, if there’s a out some really good material, like BM: S, then…
Hell yeah 
Once apon a time it was. Then they decided that the dynamic infestation was too hard to code in source, and they wanted to get paid without paying for liscensing the source engine.
Kinda cheesed me off quite frankly. I was of the opinion that they could have done a straight port to Source just like HL1 was done by Valve and it would have greatly improved NS by giving us mappers more room to build (because NS takes such large maps) without them having to re-invent the wheel.
But nooooooo, they had to be “Mr. La-dee-da Fancy Pants” with their very own engine. Bad news for them: I’m not shelling out 50 bucks for their game.
Since the NS2 developers’ alternative would be for them to release the game as a free mod, what have they lost? If they want to make money for their efforts, good on them.
Would you pay to play Black Mesa? I wonder how many people say yes in the comfort of knowing that it would never be sold.
I’d use the money I DIDN’T buy Half-Life: Source with and purchase BMS. I say this in complete confidence, but that not being the case, I guess free will do.