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As there were forum regulars who felt a playthrough of the Hazard Course was an essential part of Half-Life’s story, four of us who used Hammer semi-regularly decided to recreate the training level. This version lacked the long-awaited, soon-to-be-released Xen chapters and the Hazard Course, but did include all the files needed to make custom maps in the Source Engine’s level editor, Hammer. Time went on, and in September of 2012, the mod version of Black Mesa launched. When it was first announced on the official Black Mesa forums that the team who would go on to be named Crowbar Collective would not be remaking the original hazard course maps (using the- admittedly correct- rationale that due to Half-Life 2’s introduction of tutorial HUD hints it was obsolete), some forum members began working on a version of the project that quietly fizzled out. Ours was not the first attempt to fulfil this goal.
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