A lot of people consider Black Mesa as the DNF of mods. While it’s true that the mod has not been released yet (and although there are strong hints that it might hit PCs this year), we’ve been wondering what had happened back in 2009 and why the team did not release it back then. Thankfully, Black Mesa’s Carlos Montero has shed some light into this, stating that the team did their best to hit that deadline and although they had a working version of Black Mesa, there were so many shortcuts – which have been made in order to hit the deadline – that the end result was not up to the standards that were set by the team.

In a lovely interview with RockPaperShotgun, Carlos Montero explained – alongside other things – why the game was not released back then.

Carlos Montero said:

“We were determined to make this release date come hell or high water, and we killed ourselves to do it. We were cutting corners everywhere, cutting chunks of maps out, rushing through everything, making rash decisions. Basically, we ended up going against all of our core values just to hit this deadline we had set for ourselves. It was harrowing, frustrating, and as we came to find out, ultimately futile.”

Montero went on and said that they had a working version of Black Mesa Source, however that version had huge missing chunks of the game and none of them were proud of it anymore. And we have to say that Montero has a point. We’ve seen countless of times features of various games that were cut out in order to hit the developers their deadline. Ironically, most of gamers have been screaming – these past years – that they’d take a delay over a rushed out product, yet they criticize the Black Mesa team for doing exactly that.

And that’s one of the reasons why the Black Mesa team introduced the radio silence policy. As Montero concluded:

“We had a huge internal discussion in which we ultimately decided to break the news to the public and to re-focus and make something we could actually be proud of.”

We should also note that the radio silence has been – officially – broken and we’ve been getting lots of info for Black Mesa Source lately. Back in January, Black Mesa’s webmaster revealed that something big is coming this year and that the mod will be released after the launch of the game’s soundtrack. In April, we informed you about Black Mesa’s soundtrack page. The soundtrack has not been released yet and as we predicted back then, it could very well see a mid to late May, or even a June release. As we said back then, we expected to see a delay to that whole schedule. Now we don’t want to get your hopes up for nothing, but this could very well be the start of Black Mesa Source’s hype machine.

Stay tuned for more!