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Comment by willidiots | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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