Black Mesa, developed and published by Crowbar Collective, is considered the official Half-Life remake currently available on the market. The mod originally appeared as a free download in 2012. Fast forward a few years to when Valve acknowledged its existence and gave the studio the green light to commercially release it in 2015. Black Mesa officially released just earlier this month.
Lead Level Designer, Chon, was present during the studio's Reddit AMA and replied to an eager fan who wants to know the development team's upcoming plans. Chon revealed they are stepping away from releasing new expansions for Black Mesa, and want to take advantage of Crowbar Collective's talented team to create original IPs. Later throughout the AMA, Chon emphasized the idea in several answers but didn't drop any hints on what the future might hold.
We've considered it, but most of us are very burned out with remakes. We've put ourselves a darn talented team together here, and we want to make cool and original new games with that.
We have some projects we want to do, nothing public yet. We have a contact at Valve for license support, but we do not regularly communicate with them.
The team will stick together and move onto cool, new, original titles. We aren't really interested in continuing to work on remakes or further projects along those lines.
It is quite coincidental for Black Mesa and Half-Life: Alyx to release in the same month, but I doubt any Half-Life fans complained. The developer pledged to continuously support the title after its official release, with more spread out updates instead of the regular and smaller patches that went out throughout the title's Early Access phase.
Let us know how much time you put into Black Mesa since 2012, and what do you expect Crowbar Collective to produce next.
