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At Ars, we’re always looking for clues and actions that hint at the long, long wait Half-Life 3 may well be coming to an end. So when people started noticing the mysterious and intriguing name BlackMesa.com recently, our ears perked up for signs of a new promotional alternate reality game (ARG).
Alas, this looks like another false alarm. BlackMesa.com is simply the website of Black Mesa, which has confirmed in a public statement that it is “in fact a real Boston-area company…working hard to ensure and secure the production of vaccines and other biological products.”
HALF LIFE 3 MIGHT BE ANNOUNCED ON SEPTEMBER 30TH https://t.co/hSytiq2GoR It just went live and there’s a countdown at the bottom of the page that ends on September 30th. Once it’s done, you’ll see white text that says “This is it.” pic.twitter.com/MK3QveRc6R
— PeQu (@ImPeQu) August 9, 2024
The domain name BlackMesa.com dates back to at least 2006, when the address was filled with search engine optimization ads by a company called MDNH, Inc. But in 2022, a page advertising the domain’s availability for purchase was suddenly replaced with a mysterious logo that bears a striking resemblance to the fictional logo of Black Mesa in games. And then there’s the hard-to-read encryption at the bottom, the kind of thing an ARG might use to hide important information from plain sight.
The site remained like this, without anyone noticing or suspecting it further, until August 8, when Valve fans began to express concern on social media. “(wake up) on a Black Mesa website” which had suddenly been updated with a new header stating: “Science requires process. Our vision defends it.” Others on social media were quickly noted the old cipher text as well as New JavaScript Countdown Function Obfuscated with the internal name “Lambda Incident”. This countdown seemed to point towards something which will take place on September 30th, which seems like the perfect time to announce Half-Life 3, RIGHT?
Truth is less interesting than fiction
Valve loyalists are hoping this is a new version of the old one. Portal 2 But Potato ARG’s hopes were quickly dashed. Internet sleuths quickly found a digital paper trail for Charles Fracchia, a research scientist listed on LinkedIn and elsewhere as the founder of “Black Mesa, a stealth company developing technologies that create provable assurance for advanced manufacturing workflows” since 2022. And last Friday, the Black Mesa team published a blog post to quell any rumors about the game that might be circulating.
“While we would be honored to be a part of any Valve game, we do not work in that industry at all,” the blog post reads. “We are not secretly working on Half-Life 3Project White Sands (whatever it is/can be) or any other Valve title: we’re just nerds working to secure the global bioeconomy.
The team went on to thank the Half-Life community, which had sent “a ton of messages of support and curiosity” about the company, as well as “thousands of fake requests” that “made us laugh.” As for that old ciphertext? It turns out that its resolution I just unlocked a recruitment message The company is looking for “engineers, cybersecurity professionals, and biologists.” “KingPotatoVII, please contact us, we are trying to send you gifts for cracking the encryption some time ago,” the Black Mesa team wrote with a smiley emoji.
Any excuse is good enough to repost this video.
Despite the revelation of the real The Black Mesa Society, some of its supporters have not yet completely given up hope that this is all just a very subtle stealth marketing stunt. “What if (current scientist Charles Fraschia) was such a big fan of Half-lifelike us, and decided to use his image/likeness to make this ARG for the game?” wrote one Reddit user last week. “Maybe he reached out and went completely nuts on Valve for making this a magnum opus of an ARG. … It could just be that someone is trolling us a lot, and to be honest I’m not even mad because it’s a lot of fun!”
Stay hopeful, Valve loyalists! Half-Life 3 The truth is there, within reach, no matter what anyone says! The truth is there, in plain sight!
