Black Mesa Gameplay Video Leaks, Looks Wonderful

Remember Black Mesa?  You know, that Source total conversion mod designed to completely remake the original Half-Life in the new engine?  It was supposed to arrive three years ago.  Instead it disappeared into obscurity, its team going into a full PR blackout mode and not releasing much of anything for nearly two years.  Several months back the Black Mesa team decided to start ramping up a new media campaign leading up to the actual, final release of the mod turned game.  There's the occasional animation test video and a few screenshots here or there but nothing truly substantial.

Until now.

It seems that some overly excited dev or tester decided to leak a video of the level 'Surface Tension' to the wonderfully named ValveTime.net and, to my delight, it looks fantastic.  What's interesting to note is that the official Black Mesa dev team response to this leak is that this is indeed footage of the game that was supposed to be released when the media campaign begins to really start talking about the game.  Rather than take a step back, the BM dev team has decided to push forward their campaign and release content sooner rather than later.

A couple things to note about the video which you can watch below:

• The build present in the video is roughly a month old.

• Everything present in the video is near-final so don't expect substantial changes between now and the eventual release of the game.

• The iron sights (ADS) only applies to the .357 and crossbow as it was present in the original Half-Life Deathmatch.  These can be disabled in the final build.

• The music is final.

• The video itself is a victim of YouTube's compression algorithms so some parts are blurry and overly dark.  This is not representative of the final game and will be nicer looking and brighter.

Ok, I'll stop typing so you can watch the video.

Oh, for reference, here is the 2009 trailer.