My name is Joel Nielsen, and I am the music composer and audio lead on Black Mesa. I joined the team in June of 2005, and am one of the few original members that made it through the entire development cycle.

I played a 'tram-demo' that was given out prior to Half-Life 1's release. I couldn't believe what I was seeing was an actual video game. How could computer graphics possibly look so real!? That was enough to seal my fate as a Half-Life-For-Life-r.

Most notably from the release of WorldCraft in my early teens. I loved creating replicas of buildings around my town that had interesting gameplay layouts and had an odd fascination with trying to create a working waterslide map. I would also end up placing large boxes around the entire levels to 'fill all the leaks', then wait days for it to compile. (and now you know why Chris Horn never let me touch a map on Black Mesa)

Cowbell... Well that and simply learning how to work with audio and music in general. I jumped into Black Mesa with no prior experience. I began with more of a, "how hard could it be" mentality. Suffice it to say I quickly learned otherwise. Acquiring the skills required of ‘good’ sound and music production has been one of the most convoluted rabbit holes I've ever been down. And because of that I also love it. There’s always something more to learn and improve upon.

I used a central-vacuum and some super-sized un-inflated balloons to make the suction sound for the vents in Xen. Also, and even more interestingly, the footstep sound for the flesh surfaces contains the light open-handed slap of a wet ass cheek. I'll let your imaginations fill in the rest of the blanks, but will add a hearty 'thank you' to my wife Kala, who has helped with so many aspects of this project.

Quite honestly, it was a lot more enjoyable than difficult. I love being set free from a creative perspective and Xen gave me that opportunity. Musically it allowed me to breathe something fresh and unique into the world. And as you can tell I embraced that in full force. Adding a vocal track to every song. (oh yes, every single song has at least one female vocal track within it) I may have gone a little overboard in retrospect but I wouldn’t change it if I could. A huge shout-out again to my lovely wife for all her work!

Again, great fun. Taking a fairly regular sounding animal or environment, and then absolutely sonically mangling it beyond recognition was a welcomed change of pace from the very 'standard' sounds of the Earthbound portion. Unfortunately, some of the depth/detail is lost in-game, but if you crank the volume and listen close, there are many layers of complexity to a lot of them.

Definitely the Lobby shoot-out in QE. Many people seem to love it, which is great, but it also isn’t very Half-Life-esque in flavor, in my opinion. Being that it would likely spark a small insurrection, I won’t be making any modifications.

Somewhat unlikely considering the time required to do such a thing. That, and I want to put out my own remixes every few years, so I never have to work ever again.

Musically, I am classically trained and took lessons from age 3+. As for formal education? Yeah, definitely not. I barely have a high school diploma, if you count how little I paid attention in class or the grades... My method has always been; if you want to know how to do something, go learn it. Get your hands dirty, trying, and failing until you succeed. Don't let anyone or anything hold you back, and don't use your current reality as an excuse for why you can't. All success originates from an attitude of perseverance.

I’ll of course be helping with the next CC project. Outside of that, I have started my own game company where my small team and I are working on a unique indie MMO. Throw me a follow on twitter if any of that would be of interest. Love you all, you are an incredible community, and thanks for sticking with us to the end!

I’m Mike Hillard, My handle is CornetTheory because I’ve been a trumpet player for most of my life. In terms of games and mods, I’ve been a level designer, musician, and digital artist since 2004. I am currently composing or covering chip/game adjacent music over here: https://soundcloud.com/michael-hillard

I started down the path of voice acting because my Unreal Tournament 2004 level design friends needed voice samples for a mod. This directly led me to getting the role in Penumbra: Overture, and getting hired at a local radio station. Since then I’ve acted in at least 8 commercial indie games, and many many mod projects.

For Crowbar Collective I am primarily an actor, but over the years I have made tiny contributions in other areas, such as customizing vrad, programming the tau cannon’s wallshot particle effect, making small tweaks to the lighting on some earthbound maps, and manually editing the 2015 Multiplayer trailer on real VCRs.

By 2006 my local friends and I were obsessed with HLDM and making silly custom maps and player models. The Black Mesa team put out a general casting call for voice actors, so I decided to give it a shot.

At this time, I did not start out sounding similar to Hal Robbins, but I’m told they were not looking for a dead-on impression because they wanted several kinds of scientists. Eventually, after I was given the first script for the general chatter, I recorded the whole thing in one night out of excitement, and I started figuring out how to get the voice very close. I think it took about a year or two of practice before the similarity got to the point of fooling people with A/B comparisons; Just in time for the 2008 trailer.

As soon as I joined the team, I moved away to college. So I had two options after that: Drive 6 hours one way to my house on weekends to use my own studio to record, or find out how to treat whatever dorm room I was in. I found that a lot of walls are too smooth to stick on foam, or too hard to hang up hooks for blankets.

Kevin and I did a lot of skype calls, testing solutions. Some of which are pretty funny, but effective. For example, Buying a golf umbrella big enough to fit my mic and computer monitors, and covering the entire thing with a comforter. Eventually I built a 7ft^3 room within a room, and treated it with deadening moving blankets.

When it came to driving home, I would have to disassemble my PC and lug it back and forth.
After a few years I had assembled two sets of PCs and equipment, one for home and one for college. This also helped out when we started needing the female scientist lines, It made scheduling my mother [Lurana Hillard] easier, and we could act scenes together.

The challenge wasn’t only to get a good environment, but also to make my space and mic placements, etc. match Kevin’s setup. We were pretty strict about the sessions and I would always send test lines to compare before starting.

I recorded all of the Scientist’s general chatter at least 3 times over the years. As more scripted scenes were created and added to the game, we needed to make it match how my voice and recording environment had changed.

Adobe Audition. When I worked in radio I had learned how to edit audio to make commercials. Back then it was Cool Edit Pro.

Starting in 2007 through 2012, Kevin and I maintained using the “MXL 990” condenser and “M-Audio Delta 1010-LT” for consistency. Windows updates and driver support ended the Delta card, plus it was a PCI only board. After that, I began using the “Shure Super 55” and the “Scarlett 6i6” also, shoutouts to the Cloudlifter for dynamic mics.

It began at a very young age, wondering how cartridges worked. But a real turning point was my older brother playing with WADED.EXE for doom. It was mind-blowing that you could make your own levels. I was hooked from then on. From Duke3d to Half-Life, and then to UT2004 where the majority of my released deathmatch maps are.

Half-Quake is one of the most unique mods out there, and it really shows off what Goldsrc can do. Sven co-op, for consistently adding crazy features to the engine itself. Earth’s Special Forces (The Dragon Ball Z mod) was fun to fly around in. SMOD for HL2 because of the shovel and bullet time.

But, Rocket Crowbar will always be the gold standard.

I wish we could pack-in the awesome Hazard Course remake mod by PSR Digital for Black Mesa.

Everyone is allowed to have their own preferences, but folks should just let people enjoy things. Personally I think pineapple on pizza is tasty.




#TEAM RED SHIRT

Benjamin Truman, Design, and Narrative Lead.
Comic author and teacher living in Tucson, AZ.

Half-Life was such a resonant work of art for me. I really enjoy seeing my passion for the game connect with other people. It means a lot when I hear that our game recaptured or enhanced a memorable experience from a player’s past. It’s also wonderful to hear that our game has been an entry point to Valve’s franchise for so many people.
I also do a fair bit of work on our Twitter (@BlackMesaDevs) searching for fan-made Half-Life content. One of my favorite things to do is drop a couple hundred likes on an unsuspecting artist’s houndeye doodle.

Once Xen began, my writing job consisted of working against the idea that we needed dialog in Xen. When a design was struggling, it was only a matter of time before somebody would suggest audio diaries or a radio transmission from Earth to explain the objective. I wanted to preserve that sense of “alone in the unknown” once you reached Xen. That commitment meant we had to take special care when communicating our intention to the player.


I became involved while attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh for Game Art & Design. Some of my friends asked if I wanted to join as a 3D modeler. I declined and pitched myself as their writer instead.

Despite attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh for Game Art & Design, there were hardly any classes that dealt with design. The emphasis was on modeling/texturing/animating in 3D. I’m lucky that I got involved with the team when I did because I was quickly losing interest in school.
Black Mesa let me breakdown my favorite game and analyze the entire design. I also got to adapt the existing script, write new dialog, direct voice actors, choreograph big scenes in 3D, and design gameplay sequences. This project gave me the chance to pursue the exact education I was seeking.

I also had a lot of support for all my creative endeavors from both of my parents. I would say my real education came from my Dad, a comic author, and an illustrator. I was introduced to a lot of comics and movies from all over the world while I was growing up. I learned a lot about visual storytelling and narrative by hanging at his side.

I used Faceposer for all the choreography work.

I usually point towards this Gamasutra article about Shigeru Miyamoto’s influence while creating the original Mario (I’m especially partial to that one because it says sequential illustration is the foundation of game design).
I like to think of that article as a point-of-no-return for beginner designers. Once you understand the basic game structure in that article, you see it everywhere.

I have fond memories of some Half-Life multiplayer mods, like Action Half-Life, Firearms, Science and Industry, Counter-Strike, TFC, but the most important Half-Life mods were always the singleplayer experiences.
The biggest ones for me were the Neil Manke/Black Widow Games “U.S.S. Darkstar” and “They Hunger” series that came on PC Gamer CDs. I also liked a short mod called Deliverance. I don’t know if Gunman Chronicles counts as a mod, but that also sticks out in my mind.

My love of games began early on. I would fill up notebooks with game ideas. These were usually just little pencil or marker “screenshots” of imaginary games. I would draw up character rosters for fighting games and side-scrolling beat ‘em ups, with lists of detailed stats. When my family got a PC at home, I started making games with a program called Klik & Play that I received as a holiday gift. I eventually got into 3D level design after playing Duke Nukem 3D. I don’t think I knew the Build Engine existed until I stumbled across a How-To book for the software at a bookstore.

After that, I purchased a Quake level editor from Electronics Boutique in the mall but quickly returned it. I struggled and failed to understand the Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight editor. I was frustrated that nobody in my life knew how to work this stuff.

But, Half-Life really compelled me to learn Worldcraft on my own. Once I figured out the basics, I was hooked. I searched all over this new frontier, the internet, to find info on the program. I would print out tutorials from Handy Vandals Almanac and read them over and over again, trying to make sense of them. This all came in handy when I had to start developing in Source on Hammer.

My name is Anthony Stone and I am one of the long-standing level designers for Black Mesa. I have worked on much of the AI encounters and logic events across the game as well as building a few of the maps from scratch. I am the team’s encyclopedia of how everything works.

My first experience with Half-Life almost didn’t happen. I had no idea what I was getting when I first Installed the game and only installed it because I wanted to play Counter-Strike which was a mod back then. I began the game just to see how the graphics looked on my new PC of the time. I started playing it and was confused at first… a 10 min tram ride and then I arrive at Anomalous Materials and walked around offices with no real gameplay insight. This was very unusual. I put the game down at that point with no real intent to go back to it, but I’m glad I did. The next day I booted it up to show my brother the game I was dubbing the “work sim” when I got to the residence cascade. I was blown away and finished the game over the next day or so.

Not the most difficult thing for me personally, but a difficult thing to watch was the differences in opinion on art and style across a group of very talented people. Everyone on the team is super good at what they do and everyone has an opinion of what works and what does not. This tends to do areas over and over again in order to really master the idea the team is going for and can cause a considerable headache if you don’t check your ego at the door. You are going to have to have many hands-on your work and you may see things you really slaved over get ripped out or changed. It could be a hard pill to swallow for some. It can lead to bitter feelings or discontent but in the end, we all just want the best product that flows well in the end.

MUSIC!!! LOTS AND LOTS OF NEW MUSIC! Seriously, I can keep working for hours with music I have not heard before. It makes the hours fly by. Just no country music please… and for my wife’s sake keep me away from dubstep.

I originally started making maps for the HL2 leak way back when and then moved into making Counter-Strike Source maps. There was something super satisfying about creating content and seeing how people enjoy it and the way they play it. It also was a great creative outlet for my mind. I always loved to build stuff and this was a great way to take things in my mind and get them into a 3d world I could actually visit.

Yes and no. There was a point where we had to choose to release the Earthbound section of the game or keep fighting on to get XEN done as one major release of the game. I was very on the side of we should put out what we have rather than take the additional years to finish the full game with no end in sight. I set an ultimatum for myself. So while it was not giving up… I felt very strongly that we needed to give our fans something. It never came down to it because we did release. Truth be told it probably would not have left anyways…

I am so guilty of this. I love to watch streamers play my work. When it first came out, I would watch a few hours a night. Nowadays I check it once or so a week if I am super bored. I’ll never get tired of seeing people blow themselves up calling the lift up in the trip mine puzzle in Surface Tension.

I’m Nate! Lead Animator, VFX, Simulations at Crowbar.

The limitations of trying to make a good looking game in 2020 on an engine that first came out in 2004.

I was one of the first 5 people on the team, in early 2005. Back then they had no animators at all so my mere application meant I got accepted immediately haha.

The planning did not fall primarily on me, but it was incredibly challenging for all involved. Much of the difficulty was the immovable pillars of the original Xen campaign itself. Jumping puzzles have aged very poorly in FPS games, but we’ve got this long jump module that we have to use. We have to brainstorm emergent gameplay with only like 3 enemies (headcrab, bullsquid, houndeye) that were all early-game enemies that stopped being challenging 10 campaign hours ago. We have to make non-linear and alien-feeling levels without the aid of objective markers, tooltips, cutscenes, or any of the other crutches that modern gamers are used to.

Join a mod project for a game you’re passionate about. They’re full of like-minded people just trying to have fun and make something cool. They’ll let you make mistakes and learn the skills you need while on the job.

I’m very proud of the end product we shipped and don’t think there are that many areas it could have been better. But parts of the campaign could have been shortened so the whole experience was a little tighter in places. It’s not really an issue compared to so many modern games that pad their campaigns with pointless stuff, but just in further pursuit of a perfect FPS, there are sections of Black Mesa where you’re kinda thinking “how much longer until this part is done?”

The Source engine had several limitations that made it very difficult to get the types of animations the Xen campaign demanded. In any game engine, most movement is controlled by “bones”. That’s easy to visualize with a character like a human that anatomically has a skeleton, but bones are also controlling the pieces of a building as it blows up, or the pulsing of a protozoa membrane in Xen. With regards to bones, Source does not support “bone scaling”, it has a 128 bone limit per model, and each vertex in the model is only allowed to be influenced by 3 bones. These are all limitations that modern game engines do not have and it caused a lot of headaches. Many of the bigger destruction models were split into 5-10 “parts” and reassembled back together in Hammer to get around that 128 bone limit. When you’re dealing with something like a barrel cactus swelling up to a huge balloon and bursting, that should be just a couple of bones being scaled up. But Source can’t do that, which means you need “point clouds” of bones all over the model moving outwards to achieve the same effect. Only 3 influences per bone also meant those bone clouds had to be pretty dense or else you would get jagged deformations instead of smooth. I had to develop all sorts of strange pipelines to work around these limits.

I’d love to see a game with the crazy weapons and enemy types of Painkiller combined with the intricate level design of Half-Life. I also think technology is at the point where, with a little engine resource re-allocation and gated level design, we don’t need to have disappearing corpses, we can use bodies and gore as part of the gameplay loop.

That was the result of several inside jokes. There was an application we got early on in development that was over-the-top ridiculous (we later found out it was submitted as a joke). And we started imagining how this applicant might dress himself, and one of the artists whipped up this purple hat. Our Level Designers love to cram their maps full of easter eggs, and then Half-Life 2 Episode 2 with the gnome run gave them the idea to do a hat run.

Oh, lots. Anytime a good FPS game came out in the last 10 years we’d be like “oh we need X, Y, and Z in Black Mesa!” For the Xen campaign, probably DOOM 2016 was the strongest influence in terms of how to craft cool boss encounters, and lots of sprawling vertical levels with minimal navigation hints (though they did have objective markers like everybody else these days).

We knew that our Xen was going to be dramatically different from Valve’s, and in turn both of our versions dramatically different from what Laidlaw originally envisioned. Comparing Half-Life Alyx and Half-Life 1, you can pretty much see how that’s the same artistic vision, despite a 20-year graphics jump. But Half-Life 1 to Black Mesa Xen, absent the iconic Half-Life fauna, you wouldn’t peg those to be the same universe. And we knew that. It was part of our core strategy to break from the original Xen campaign and forge our own path. We didn’t want 6 hours of green-grey levels, we wanted to experiment with distinct biomes and different color palettes, so it was an intentional choice for us.

I’ve been a level designer at Crowbar Collective since around 2007. My first task after joining was to rework Undertow and bring it up to the standards of other multiplayer maps we had at the time, although that version was never released and was subsequently redone again; it was still a great learning experience. Following after Undertow I started work on the later parts of Unforeseen Consequences (the coolant labs & lower canals sections) & then onto assisting with detailing and level design work on a few parts of Questionable Ethics.

Following the mod release in 2012 I & others set about working through the large number of bug reports we had received and endeavored to resolve all possible combined with making level design & visual improvements where possible. A few old blog posts I wrote regarding the fixing endeavors can be found here & here if you are interested in reading more. I also assisted in detailing & optimization work on the multiplayer map Crossfire.

My primary focus for Xen development was assisting in extra detail work that was needed on the Xen chapter followed by early blockout work and assisting in arting sections of the Gonarch chapter; in particular the headcrab canyon and water cave & assisting in detailing sections of Interloper chapter both interior and exterior.

I’d always enjoyed tinkering with map editors that came with games I played like the Age of Empire series & Red Faction, but I think my interest in modding and then subsequently game development stems from being introduced to Half-Life modding by an old secondary school friend of mine. He was part of a modding community called TWHL (The Whole Half-Life) from there I started to experiment & make levels for various competitions they ran and then onto joining various Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods before joining Black Mesa.

I don’t think I could point to one specific thing but trying to figure out creative ways to overcome hurdles that are thrown your way due to engine limitations and such has been the general gist of working as a level designer while on Black Mesa.

When the Hammer model viewer would break constantly requiring it to be restarted. But then realizing that I could fix it by simply closing the browser and moving the mouse cursor between the 3D & 2D views to resolve the issue instead of restarting the entire program: that was definitely a boost to my productivity when it came to arting levels and in particular the various parts of Xen.

While I didn’t directly study game design, I did however for Graphic Design & Communication which indirectly helped in regards to composition, lighting & detailing among others for my role as a level designer & environmental arting.

I try to watch streams of Black Mesa when I have the chance, usually lurking, however. They’re a great source of seeing a wide spectrum of people playing your game and seeing if something does or doesn't work to perhaps try and improve it. My particular favorite thing to do is watch people's reactions to seeing parts of Black Mesa for the first time, the reveals of Xen & Gonarch and its subsequent chapter-long battle never get old to see.

Poke 646 is usually one that springs to mind whenever I think of old Half-Life mods that I had a lot of fun playing, But I think special mention should be given to the many multiplayer based mods that I have sunk many hours in to like Day of Defeat, The specialists and in particular Natural Selection which was a personal favorite with its interesting gameplay & setting. In recent years Half-life: Echoes has been a standout, along with Caged, Year Long Alarm & Azure sheep among others.

I will always accept pineapple placed atop a delicious pizza, especially on a sourdough base.

Craig Mirfin

Hi, my name is Craig Mirfin and in my spare time, I am a Level Designer on Black Mesa. I joined the team over 5 years ago mainly to work on the Multiplayer map “Bounce” and then moved from multiplayer to start on the daunting task of creating the Xen Levels.

My day job is as a Senior Level Designer at Studio Gobo working on AAA games like For Honor and the recently released Hyperscape. I really do owe this position to working on Black Mesa, not only giving me the chance to work with a great team of people but to prove to myself that I could do level design as a career. It's been a hell of a ride these last 10 years but so worth it…. Crowbar Collective…. About That Beer I Owe You! :)

It allows me to relive Half-Life with a new coat of paint :) Hopefully playing Blackmesa feels like you are playing the old Half-Life with those rose-tinted glasses off, yet still getting the same buzz from the game. It's a testament to the talent in the team to ship what a lot of people thought wasn't doable.

When I first started fleshing out the first few Xen maps it was extremely time-consuming with how displacements work and how to smooth “subdivide” them. As Xen is mainly organic, you couldn't really rely on the traditional BSP method of creating environments. We were really just trying to find how far we could push displacements. After the first year of Xen development we doubled the number of displacements we could have, which not only allowed us more flexibility but also kept us away from hitting displacement limits on a daily basis. Also, a huge hurdle jumped was with subdividing displacements. At the start a Xen map would still take 10 hours to subdivide until we began working with Worm Wall which reduced this to minutes, resulting in a huge increase in productivity.

I had spent 3 long years prior creating a 5 map L4D2 campaign and after a little break after releasing this I wanted to get back on the Hammer horse and luckily Crowbar were looking for Level Designers, I applied as I love creating maps. It was only after I got the gig that I was told the team had been greenlit to go commercial. I soon moved from multiplayer to Xen.

I had just been given a 486 PC from work and the IT guy gave me a copy of this game called ‘Half-Life’... I was hooked. Little did I know that would be my route into Game Dev as a career years later.

I think if you feel it's too late to get into game design then think again. I got into game dev very late in life (I was about 44 :E) If you're passionate about game design then do something off your own back, be it a game jam, modding project, or be actively testing a project. Doors open, you make great contacts and things happen. The key thing is to enjoy what you do and never give up. If someone is better than you... so what.. try and learn, don't be afraid to ask questions and aim to get better. Never let that put you off. Always leave your ego at the door and your passion for what you do will shine through. All the above is still true if you're just starting out… What are you waiting for? They're waiting for you in the Test Chamberrrrr.

Yes. Working full time and then in your spare time, takes its toll on your mental health, family, and friends. It's a huge commitment but I hope this has paid off with what the team has achieved.

A very very long time ago. As a kid I was hooked playing games, it was a way to let my imagination go wild. I used to write small games on a ZX81 and then later ZX Spectrum. Got into modding Duke Nukem on the build engine in my early 20’s, then got into the Hammer Editor and never looked back.

When designing the temporary science base in Xen map 1, I always wanted to add a tiny glimpse of human life via some kind of transmission from Kleiner on a screen. Just to add a little human narrative in what is a chapter devoid of human contact. Nothing that would outstay its welcome but I felt by the time you got to the polytunnels it would have been a nice call back to the science team on earth. Maybe I’ll add this as a Mod at some point that could lead onto a small side narrative to flesh out the base a little more.

The science polytunnels were inspired by watching the Martian. I wanted them to have this vulnerability as the film had. It was a simple design that worked well with what shapes I was trying to create. I worked closely with Spencer and luckily we were on the same page with the design. I did intend it to be bigger but it was easy to get distracted from the main star which is Xen. Fun fact, I designed the little white Xen creature containers based on the scene in the film Evolution. That underground cave in the film always reminded me of what Xen should look like and they had cool science gear that fitted well with the black mesa style. Also, the tripods and theodolites are a call back to when I used to be a Civil Engineer as I did a lot of surveying and thought it was the kind of low tech that the science team would have.

I think the Level design on Black Mesa is a little different from a normal industry studio’s approach. Most Level Designers (LD) would only really block out and then pass to Level Artists (LA) but with Black Mesa, there's enough art already in-game that the designers can set dress a level to a very high standard. This is more of a modding mentality that I personally think helps bridge the LD/LA gap. Its something I’ve really pushed for in my daytime LD work which has proven to be a very positive thing.

Hello, my name is Kevin Sisk, and I was initially brought onto in late January 2007 to voice the security guard NPCs in Black Mesa.
Over time, I slowly branched out into other departments and lent a helping hand. Departments such as:

- Audio Editing for the Character(s) Dialog,
- Sound Design here and there for things like the overhead vox systems, the retinal scanner (one of my favs), etc
- Recorded some alien voices/SFX, etc.
- Worked bunch on the in-game scenes /choreography,
- Even have done a bit of 3d modeling for a few things.
Oh yeah, I also voiced the Gman...tee hee.

For straight-up voiceover editing, I typically used Adobe Audition 3.0, and FLStudio for some of the more electronic-based sound design bits I did on the project.

All I know is my gut says "maybe"

Pretty often. I always look for YouTubers who have never experienced the Half-Life saga in any shape or form. I’m always surprised to see when someone decides to play "Black Mesa" first instead of Half-Life then goes straight into Half-Life 2 afterward.

I suppose this is a testament to the good word-of-mouth that Black Mesa gets for being a respectful recreation of the original even though we put our spin on things in quite a few places.

That said, I would encourage ppl to play the original HL at some point, so as to better understand and appreciate the historical significance it brings to the first person shooter genre, and how far the HL series has come since that first outing.

The Hunger" was a favorite of mine back in the day. Good zany zombie-killing fun.

For Microphones, I used an MXL 990 condenser which currently interfaces with a Focusrite 2I2 USB Preamp.

In the earlier days, the 990 would have instead plugged into a Behringer Eurorack 1202 analog mixer and then that mixer’s output went into an M-Audio Delta 1010LT sound card.

It was good for the regular conversation type vo and shouting loudnesses, but the noise floor on the mixer made the more whispery stuff a little tough to handle in post. Once I got the Focusrite though, the newer recordings had like 15+ dB less noise overall and made my life a lot easier.



BOOM. HEADSHOT.
NOW - ISH (2018)



THEN (2009)

I got into Half-Life and Counter-Strike when they first came out. I immediately got into level design in Worldcraft and modeling in 3ds Max. I made several CS maps for my local gaming group over the years and moved to Hammer when Source came out. My desire to make some more artistic levels was hindered by the unfriendly tools in Source. Fixing what I felt to be a broken pipeline turned into a decade-long adventure of creating Wall Worm, becoming the technical artist on Black Mesa and Product Owner at Autodesk for 3ds Max.

I’m a family man who doesn’t really watch much TV or even play many different games. I have been playing the same set of multiplayer games for decades now (CS and Battlefield mostly, though recently Pubg too). The way I see it is that a game doesn’t get boring just because it’s old--just like basketball never gets old for me. I play CS with my family and close friends; if I’m not playing with people I actually know, my interest wanes quickly. When it comes to single-player games, I get more enjoyment from creating games than from playing them.

At Black Mesa, my role ranges from building pipeline tools between 3ds Max and Source to making some assets here and there, assisting other artists to complete their tasks and teaching teammates how to use various functions and workflows.



There are many things that I love about Black Mesa. For me, as cool as Black Mesa is, the game itself pales in comparison to the opportunities it gave me. Most importantly, I’ve made some great friends. Professionally, Black Mesa helped add a higher level of legitimacy to my work with Wall Worm in the eyes of a wider audience. Black Mesa gave me the opportunity to learn to work with others in a way I had not really done before; facing the challenges of working with a remote group of talented but wildly diverse personalities was a valuable experience for me.


One of the things I hoped to accomplish when I was hired in 2015 was to move the whole team to a 3ds Max pipeline that did not use Hammer. While I was well acquainted with the Source community’s deep attachment to Hammer, I naively expected it would be different on our team. As it turned out, I was never able to get our level designers to embrace 3ds Max. They saw the value in what the artists were doing with Max by sculpting the landscapes, but for one reason or another, the level designers did not want to make the leap.

So we settled on a hybrid pipeline of Hammer to Max to Hammer. The challenge for me was that I knew the file formats, capabilities, and limitations of both Hammer and Max better than anyone else--so knowing that the hybrid method of constantly round-tripping exported data was not ideal weighed on me all the time. Iteration was severely hampered because of this, in my opinion. This was probably the greatest frustration I had.

Eventually, I gave in to the reality that the setup we had was not going to change. It worked well enough for the rest of the team to be satisfied, and some of the conventions we developed did make it a little more smooth over time. Learning to accept that was a valuable lesson for me--you may believe you have the right way to do something, but there are always many ways to skin a cat. In the end, we were able to make a game that we all get to share pride in.

3ds Max.

No. I actually dropped out of high school. There are many paths to education. I don’t recommend that path for all people, but the only thing you really need for most fields is a willingness to learn and make yourself better. If you really want to learn and you set goals for yourself, you can learn what you need to succeed. Education should be seen as a lifelong journey.

Just do it. It seems cliche, but that’s my view on a great many things. You learn by doing things. That’s how I’ve always approached everything. It’s also what I’ve tried to instill in all of my children. My son wanted to be a fitness trainer… I’m glad he just decided to do it! The same principle certainly applies to games.


I started in 2015, so I didn’t have to wait as long as most of the other members. For the most part, I didn’t have to resist burnout. Even with a few frustrations, I felt lucky to be part of the Black Mesa adventure. Working with creative people invigorates me. And the guys became my friends. Below is a picture of Brian Dale and I visiting the Wright Patterson Airforce Museum together.

I’ve been with the team from the beginning. I’m the 2nd oldest (was the oldest until Craig joined). I originally started as a concept artist and that role changed many times over the years. I eventually moved to a 3d artist/ environmental artist.

Learning how to do new things and meeting a bunch of cool artists over the years.

My lack of personal time to work on things usually around the holidays due to my real job and having to shoehorn things into an outdated engine.

Photoshop, Substance Painter, Quixel suite, 3DS max, silo3d, World Machine, and blender.

The original game that came out in 1997.
Did you go to school for your respective parts of the project? No, I am in the medical field. I started working on the mod as a hobby.

Start using a 3d modeling program and practice, practice, practice. You should also learn to use a substance painter. Start small and work your way up to more complex things. Do your own mods of things and don’t expect to get paid or have success. Expect to fail a bunch and learn how to do something better because you learned what NOT to do. Also, learn to take CONSTRUCTIVE criticism and change your work.

I had to treat it like a job sometimes which was difficult when it was just a free mod. When it became a commercial project, I really had to treat it like a job (even though I have a full time plus job). I worked most of my vacations to get my stuff done. Sometimes you have to just walk away from the computer for a week or 2 and then go back and keep plugging away.

A game similar to BF 2142 and something along the lines of X-wing series. Would love to remake wing commander in the style of the box art from the original.