This post will probably be of some interest to people who are interested in the history of the development of Half Life. I chose to post this on the Black Mesa forums as I’ve followed the development of the mod for a few years now, and assumed there are perhaps some like-minded people on here who would be interested in a bit about the development of the original game.
I’ll keep a longish story as short as I can.
I live in England, about 4 miles from a now partially decommisioned air base, RAF Alconbury. The USAAF have been active here (it was essentailly a pure US base until about 10 years ago) from 1942 up until the present day, and I have a couple of good friends who have been stationed there. Alconbury airfield is host to a Cold War bunker called Building 210, aka “Magic Mountain”. It was completed in the late 1980’s and decommisioned about 6 months after the Berlin wall came down in 1989.
My girlfriends father (don’t you just hate it when people mention girlfriends in forum posts?! It can’t be helped in this case…), had in the past mentioned that he used to patrol the base in the early to late 90’s, as the base was slowly being taken offline. He’s 72 now and long since retired from security. I brought up the subject of the base, and he just mentioned off the cuff that he remembers some people at the Magic Mountain filming and taking pictures in the early-mid nineties for a game called “Half Life”.
I’m a bit scant on details here, but he says he remembers some people dressed in white/camo army outfits, and a few props laid about here and there. They had access to the subterranean levels of Building 210, and he recalls them talking about taking reference footage for an upcoming game.
This was the first I’ve ever heard of this, and with some digging realised that there wasn’t really any infomation on Valves presence here at Alconbury, but I did find some good pictures and info on the bunker itself.
You can see Building 210 if you put these coordinates on Google maps: 52.376516, -0.215698
The subterranean levels are off limits at the moment, although you can get access somehow I beleive. I’m looking into booking some time there to take some pictures.
Anyway enough waffle, here’s some pictures taken last year sometime, not by me though. They give you a good idea of where Valve were getting reference material from.
All above images are copyright tocsin_bang.
TL;DR, Some pictures of where Valve took reference images for the original HalfLife.
