In 2006, the group, which started as a 13-person team that eventually became known as the the Crowbar Collective, got down to work rebuilding one of the most beloved games in the history of the medium. The Black Mesa project began around 2005 as a collaboration between a couple of modding groups with the same idea. Not a simple port, like Valve had done with its poorly received Half-Life: Source, but a remake, one that leveraged the strengths of the Source engine to make that original game new again. Another of those projects was Black Mesa, an attempt to rebuild the original Half-Life in its entirety for the Source engine. The Half-Life 2 fan community rapidly became a hub for a vast, robust scene of modders, folks who produced incredible games like Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable-both of which would eventually get ported to different game engines and released as stand-alone titles, and both of which had a huge impact on the future of gaming.
It was that last one-the modabilty of the Source engine-that players truly embraced.
