Gearbox Software is most commonly associated with the Borderlands series nowadays, but decades ago it was also responsible for developing Half-Life: Blue Shift. This was a 2001 add-on to Valve's original Half-Life, which told the story of that fateful day at the Black Mesa Research Facility from the perspective of Gordon's security guard pal, Barney Calhoun. Now that Black Mesa, thanks to a group of modders called the HECU Collective.
The HECU Collective means for Black Mesa: Blue Shift to be exactly what you'd expect: an update of Half-Life: Blue Shift featuring all the enhancements and new features found in the modernised Black Mesa. The original Blue Shift, released several years after Half-Life, added an 'HD texture pack' that gave Half-Life a crisper look, and the leap should be all the more noticeable now, 20 years later.
Blue Shift isn't a long game – in fact, it can be finished in a single sitting – and it's the rare game told from the perspective of a low-level mook. You get to see a lot of the stuff going on behind the scenes in Gordon Freeman's story, and eventually even make a trip to Xen.
Black Mesa expands the original Half-Life's Xen segments considerably, so it's possible we'll see more of that in Black Mesa: Blue Shift too – although Barney's job really is to get the hell out of the base with all his limbs intact, and part of the add-on's appeal is, in our view, its brevity.
The modders decided to begin work on Black Mesa: Blue Shift when they learned about the cancellation of Black Mesa: Insecurity, a mod that began way back in 2014.
HECU Collective shared some early work-in-progress screenshots on ModDB this week, and it says it will be releasing a demo of Black Mesa: Blue Shift in the near future. We'll be excited to see where they go with it.