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Official Site: Valve

The Black Mesa Research Facility (also simply called Black Mesa) is a fictional underground laboratory complex that serves as the primary setting for the video game Half-Life and its expansions, as well as its remake, Black Mesa. It also features in the wider Half-Life universe, including the Portal series. Located in the New Mexico desert in a decommissioned Cold War missile site, it is the former employer of Half-Life 's protagonist, Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist, and a competitor of Aperture Science. While the facility ostensibly conducts military-industrial research, its secret experiments into teleportation have caused it to make contact with the alien world of Xen, and its scientists covertly study its life-forms and materials. An "anti-mass spectrometer" experiment conducted on Xen matter causes a Resonance Cascade disaster that allows aliens to invade Earth, and is the catalyst for the events of the series.

Half-Life was critically praised for both its storytelling and level design. At the time, the integration of narrative in the form of interactive cutscenes and NPCs was considered groundbreaking for a first-person shooter.

The monorail sequence that introduces the player to the Black Mesa facility was initially intended as a tech demo. Series writer Marc Laidlaw stated that when a programmer implemented a new type of game object called "func_tracktrain", which allowed trains to branch onto different tracks, as well as bank and pivot into turns, Laidlaw decided to incorporate a train into the game's story. The path of the monorail itself is made up of six different map files without individual loading screens, adding hallways as transition areas to give the illusion of level streaming.

The starting monorail sequence became well-known for allowing the player to walk freely around the train and look at whatever they chose, rather than be locked in place. Other scripted events that were notable for allowing the player to retain full control include the Resonance Cascade disaster.

Black Mesa Research Facility has not been a contender in any CBUB matches.