Blackmesa II Part 1

Foreword by macroman
Recognition is the holy grail for case modders the world over. Recognition, that is, not for who you are or who you know, but purely for your creativity - that is something special.

This recognition is exactly what happened to bit-tech.net forum member Christophe Jambon, aka PilouX, when Gabe Newell, founder of Valve Software, saw his Blackmesa case mod and was so impressed that he commissioned a one-off masterpiece specifically for Valve to demonstrate their latest blockbuster on.

bit-tech.net, in conjunction with Valve Software, proudly present Black Mesa II, the Official Half Life² Demo PC.




This is the complete build article for the Half Life² Demo PC that I built at the request of Gabe Newell, founder/managing director of Valve Software. For people who did not follow this project via my worklog in the bit-tech forum, here is a little background regarding the birth of this mod.

A short time after I had finished my first Blackmesa HL² casemod, I received an E-mail from Gabe Newell himself. He and all the Valve staff were very impressed by what I had done to this case and they wanted me to build a similar casemod to use as a Demo PC in their main conference room. This was the start of another HL² adventure for me...

I wanted to do something similar to my previous HL² case with rusty bolts and broken pieces - but not an exact replica, as I wanted to make this new Valve-sponsored case with enough differences for it to be unique in its own right.

After seeing some HL² screenshots I decided to give the case an orange theme, something similar to the reservoir that can be seen in the lab screenshot below.