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Black Mesa

blackmesa.com

64 pointstwalichiewicz60 comments

Smells like an ARG / marketing campaign. Their "want to talk" email is "truthorconsequences@", they have two "blog posts" and a list of vaguely related press pieces (none of which mention them), their logo is clearly a derivative of the "other" Black Mesa's.

There's a countdown at the bottom of the page too. Which definitely makes me think it's an arg.

Ahh good catch - counting down to midnight on October 1.

Also the logo is literally exactly the Black Mesa logo from Half Life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mesa_Research_Facility), except inside a badge/chevron shame instead of a circle.

Either this is something Valve is running, or I bet whoever made this will get a copyright take-down soon.

The class for the container of the countdown is "lambda-incident."

Below that there is hidden text which says "Thanks Nothing Master ;)" and the following JS code which is heavily obfuscated and updates the countdown container:

function _0x1a2b(_0x5c2d) { function _0x3b4e() { const _0x6f1b = new Date()['getTime'](), _0x7d3a = Math['floor']((_0x5c2d - _0x6f1b) / 0x3e8), _0x8b7f = document['querySelector']('.\x6c\x61\x6d\x62\x64\x61\x2d\x69\x6e\x63\x69\x64\x65\x6e\x74\x20\x64\x69\x76\x20\x70'); _0x8b7f['textContent'] = _0x7d3a > 0x0 ? '' + _0x7d3a : '\x54\x68\x61\x74\x27\x73\x20\x69\x74\x2e'; _0x7d3a > 0x0 && setTimeout(_0x3b4e, 0x3e8); } _0x3b4e(); }

function _0x4c2f(_0x7f1b, _0x3d7e, _0x5b6d, _0x2f7a, _0x1e9c, _0x4b2a) { return new Date(_0x7f1b + ' ' + _0x3d7e + ', ' + _0x5b6d + ' ' + _0x2f7a + ':' + _0x1e9c + ':' + _0x4b2a)['getTime'](); }

const _0x5c2d = _0x4c2f('\x53\x65\x70\x74\x65\x6d\x62\x65\x72', 0x1e, 0x7e8, 0x17, 0x3b, 0x3b); _0x1a2b(_0x5c2d);

But all this really does is count down to October 1st, as stated.

When the countdown reaches zero, it displays the message "That's it."

Deobfuscated, for the curious: https://pastebin.com/091KB37u

Likely. Valve has a new game in closed-ish beta right now.

But that game isn't Half-Life related.

That’s just what they want you to think!

They're waiting for you, Gordon — in the test chamberrr

I must have missed the meme/memo, could you define "ARG"?

Alternative Reality Game, like ilovebees or NIN's Year Zero. Basically an ad campaign with audience participation.

Alternate Reality Game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

Alternative Reality Game. See the (kinda epic) Portal 2 ARG https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Portal_ARG. First came to know about it completely uninitiated through the Potato Sack Pack.

I think it's certainly an effective marketing campaign. I don't think it's an ARG. Too many things pass the smell test (referencing real companies, reposting real announcements from random accounts, etc). I bet you the countdown is when they come out of stealth. They're not going to use Black Mesa for their business (they're probably even called something else internally). It's all just a ploy to drum up attention.

Maybe, but some counterpoints:

1. They specifically say it's not: "As many of you correctly assessed, we're actually a real company in the Boston area. We're working hard to assure and secure vaccine and other biological manufacturing production."

2. A company focused on paperwork compliance sounds pretty realistic and not the sort of sexy work like you'd expect for fictitious company in a marketing campaign. I think in the game Black Mesa did scary bio research -- very sexy -- not compliance, although tbc I don't know the Half Life universe well.

Also from LinkedIn it seems very legit? Like this is their CEO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesfracchia/.

Profile has been around for a long time, lots of corroborating info elsewhere on the web (like https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200625005037/en/Dot...).

Black Mesa in the game was more high energy physics/interdimensional travel not anything medical like on the website. Both topics could be under the “mad science” label

Ah, thanks for the correction

On your second point, Aperture Science was originally founded to manufacture shower curtains for the military and we all know how that worked out.

I've never heard anything to confirm this, but I've always assumed that this was a reference to the history of Ball Aerospace, with its improbable origin and evolution from a company that made glass jars and lids for grandma's rhubarb preserves.

On the other hand, the about us page lists an apparently real person as the founder, and there are links to a talk by him at a real conference: https://www.youtube.com/live/mRmjKZVkYgw?t=15681s

They've owned the domain since 2022, and changed it to explicitly say that it's not part of an ARG in June 2023: https://web.archive.org/web/20230630002958/https://blackmesa...

"Truth or Consequences" is a place in New Mexico, so at least on theme.

Black Mesa is a good game itself.

https://www.crowbarcollective.com/games/black-mesa

I clicked because I thought this was going to be about the game

Same. It was disappointing.

I enjoyed most of it except the moments it turned my GPU into a leaf blower for no reason. I’d look at the floor and my computer began melting and then I’d look ahead into the level and it would settle down.

I swear the game is trying to create an IRL resonance cascade in my house.

I've just started my Nth play through. I think my favourite bit is the subtitles on the scientist that says "they're waiting for you in the test chamber"

Any suggestions for getting past the expanded Xen stuff? I lost my momentum and quit after yet another long conveyer belt / cargo pod section.

Sadly not really. It's really impressive what they turned Zen into, but it does drag on. I don't think there's much after that, and the final fight does have some spectacle that you should see.

Aw that's too bad. I'd take a longer under / on the rails section compared to that factory stuff any day.

It's not clear to me if this is a joke/game/whatever or a real company founded by people who are really big fans of half life as they claim.

You can search for corporations in massachusetts where they claim they are located.[1]

Surprisingly to me, there are 4 results for "Black Mesa"

[1]https://corp.sec.state.ma.us/corpweb/CorpSearch/CorpSearch.a...

There is a corporation registered under "Black Mesa Technologies" with the same executives btw

https://corp.sec.state.ma.us/CorpWeb/CorpSearch/CorpSummary....

Seems like a bad idea for a company to name itself after the villain/location of one of the most popular games in history. Was Cyberdyne Systems taken?

This is an obvious satire based on Half-Life itself. The logo is an exact copy, it talks about resonance cascades, etc.

Other comments here, and their own blog posts, seem to disagree with it being a parody.

Was Cyberdyne Systems taken?

yes: https://www.cyberdyne.jp/english/

Yeah, Cyberdyne Inc is a japanese company. Their main product line is the "Hybrid Assistive Limb" (HAL) exoskeleton, a powered exoskeleton mobility suit targeted at keeping the elderly in their jobs for longer.

This seems like a real company? They have a LinkedIn page with several dozen real-seeming employees:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/black-mesa-technology/

You can post whatever you want to LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/company/aperture-science-enrichment...

Now I have seen everything! The people section there is particularly creepy.

Sure, but getting a bunch of apparently real people to edit their LinkedIn profiles to list this as their fake full-time job (in place of whatever real job they presumably have) seems like too much work for a prank

There is literally Black Mesa and multiple other Aperture companies at similar companies

https://blackmesa.com/resonance-cascades

As many of you correctly assessed, we're actually a real company in the Boston area. We're working hard to assure and secure vaccine and other biological manufacturing production. As much as we would be honored to be part of any Valve game - we do not work in this sector at all. We are not secretly working on Half Life 3, Project White Sands (whatever that is/may be) or any other Valve title - we're just nerds working to secure the global bioeconomy.

=====

Or so they say...

Are you concerned about unforeseen consequences of your research -_-

only in sector C

Look, I’m certain you’re doing great work, but I gotta know - was the name chosen purposely??

But why would there be a secret countdown at the bottom of the page, ticking seconds, with ~46 days to go?

Wait is this fair use? Aren't they just asking for a trademark dispute?

I'm not sure 'Black Mesa', being a real place (well, 4 real places), is trademark-able.

Some weird Half life episode 3 marketing but whatever, lemme grab my crowbar

Reading the title initially I was thinking about the Half-Life remake. :)

My friends at Aperture Science are displeased...

No jobs page :(

And it should have a humans.txt.

Seems there was one, linked from here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/black-mesa-technology_the-lis...

but I don't see an archived copy anywhere.

I don’t understand how folks are missing the article with the head crab photo while talking about logos and javascript.

> We love the Half Life community. In the last couple of days we've received a ton of messages of support and curiosity about Black Mesa. It's heartening to see that the internet can still be a place where people send inquisitive messages while staying respectful - thank you. Thank you as well to those who sent the thousands of fake inquiries on our website, they made us laugh. We loved seeing the creative messages.

> As many of you correctly assessed, we're actually a real company in the Boston area. We're working hard to assure and secure vaccine and other biological manufacturing production. As much as we would be honored to be part of any Valve game - we do not work in this sector at all. We are not secretly working on Half Life 3, Project White Sands (whatever that is/may be) or any other Valve title - we're just nerds working to secure the global bioeconomy.

> We <3 all of you, you've made us laugh quite a bit this week at a time where we needed it. We might put up a couple fun challenges and send the first solvers some swag. That is Black Mesa - the Boston biotech company swag.

> Our love, > The Black Mesa team.

> PS: Gabe, call us. You know where we are.

Seems cringey as hell if they just decided to squat on the name and then pleasantly invite Gabe to call them as if that’s cool

I think it's not so much "missing" it as it is dismissing it as a red-herring. ARGs often have fake-outs. And the site's code/logo lean hard enough into the fictional Black Mesa lore that people are skeptical of it.

So Half Life was right?

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