Hello, all. Longtime lurker…finally posting.
The thing that was always fascinating and interesting to me about the Black Mesa Research Facility from the original Half-Life was the particulars of what could be gleaned about the facility itself. What kind of research went on there? Who operated it? How would it really be organized in a the modern structure of government?
Obviously we all assumed it was the generic, prototypical “government research facility”, but there wasn’t much detail beyond that. But for anyone who has ever visited or worked at one of the Department of Energy National Laboratories, you immediately noticed striking similarities in the type of facility (particularly NNSA facilities like Lawrence Livermore or Los Alamos). For that reason, the narrative I created in my mind made Black Mesa a DOE National Laboratory. Not a huge deal, but it was the realism of HL that, in different ways, made all of us love it.
For those unfamiliar with DOE National Laboratories, they don’t just do energy research. And for those who think they’re familiar with them, they don’t do just nuclear weapons research. The fact is that the national security laboratories (labs like LLNL, LANL, ORNL) indeed have a long and continuing history with nuclear weapons and maintenance of the US nuclear stockpile. But the DOE National Labs do so much more, performing amazing basic research in nearly every scientific field — bio and life sciences, particle accelerators, nuclear research, renewable energy, robots, computer science, lasers, supercomputers, physics, materials science…you name it.
Fast forward to BM. After waiting for years, as most of us have, to see what the creators were able to come up with, I was delighted to see a level of attention to detail on some of these minor narrative areas. In addition to all of the bulletin boards typical of a federal facility and all of such items that add that realism and authenticity, the devs have gone a step further and established the Black Mesa Research Facility’s heritage.
In Unforeseen Consequences, a malfunctioning computer terminal is visible on the wall immediately after leaving Sector C. The Department of Energy’s familiar seal is prominently displayed alongside the Black Mesa seal on the terminal: the Black Mesa Research Facility is a Department of Energy National Laboratory. It might sound ridiculous, but as a grown adult that little tidbit in the HL universe, even if just from the minds of the BM devs, was really pleasing to see.
Another element of authenticity, and also consistent with the fact that the military has significant connections to some of the more advanced research at the DOE National Labs: notice the control console for the rocket carrying the satellite has a military crest with the caption “AGGRESSOR BEWARE”. This is the seal of the US Air Force 44th Missile Wing, a strategic missile wing which was an LGM-30 Minuteman ICBM unit from the 1960s until its deactivation in 1994. As HL took place ostensibly took place in the 2000s, there is a small continuity problem here, but frankly I don’t care. (I suppose you could say the unit wasn’t really inactivated, but instead became secret…wouldn’t really happen, but hey, it’s fiction!) It’s pretty awesome to see this kind of detail, because even though it’s just fictional, it gives nerds like me who care about that kind of stuff all the more detail to imagine what Black Mesa might really be like.
So thanks, devs, for making an awesome reimagination of an awesome game.