Blue Shift shows the events from the viewpoint of a security guard, Barney Calhoun, who joins a group of scientists who use the teleportation technology to evacuate survivors from the base. Eventually, the player fights through the facility and teleports to Xen to try to seal the tear from the other end, where a Xen creature is keeping it open. This serves to foreshadow many of the challenges the player will face, as well as the labyrinth-like structure of the game. In Half-Life, protagonist Gordon Freeman is introduced to the facility in a notable sequence involving very little interactivity. The resulting crisis is seen from several points of view in Half-Life and its expansions. As a result, Xen creatures are teleported into the facility and prey on its human inhabitants. At the beginning of Half-Life, one such crystal, revealed in Episode Two to have been provided by the G-Man, is put through an anti-mass spectrometer and causes a resonance cascade, tearing the spacetime continuum. Creatures and crystals from Xen are consequently brought back to the facility for testing. Prior to the beginning of Half-Life, scientists experimenting on teleportation discover Xen, a border dimension somehow intricately involved in the teleportation process. Over the course of the series, Black Mesa is revealed to be conducting top-secret research into various fields, such as teleportation and experimental weapons research. The facility is depicted as a vast complex of underground research laboratories as well as surface constructions such as offices, chemical waste disposal plants, and personnel dormitories, all powered by a hydroelectric dam and connected by a tram system. The base is a decommissioned ICBM launch silo in the New Mexico desert that has been turned into a scientific research complex.
The Black Mesa Research Facility is the primary setting for Half-Life and its three expansions, Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Decay. Black Mesa Research Facility, a fictional scientific research complex in New Mexico that forms the setting for the video game Half-Life and the game with the same name.The Black Mesa test chamber in Half-Life, where the resonance cascade is caused.Black Mesa (Warm Springs, Arizona), a southern section of Black Mountains (Arizona) containing the Warm Springs Wilderness, and setting for the 1936 film The Petrified Forest.Black Mesa (Navajo County, Arizona), in the White Mountains.Black Mesa Peabody Coal controversy, the controversy surrounding a Peabody Coal mine in the Black Mesa (Apache-Navajo Counties, Arizona).Black Mesa (Apache-Navajo Counties, Arizona), an upland coal-bearing mesa, mountainous area in Navajo and Apache Counties, Arizona.Black Mesa Test Range, a United States Army rocket testing facility in Utah.Black Mesa (Oklahoma), in Colorado, New Mexico, and the highest point in Oklahoma.