Black Mesa Personnel

"Work smart, work safe. Your future depends on it!"

- Black Mesa Personnel propaganda poster

Black Mesa employs in its facility two main groups of civilian employees: science personnel and security personnel, along with various other inhabitants including administrative personnel, service personnel and occasionally the employees' families. The base also keeps a small military presence.

All facility personnel wear identity badges that must be displayed at all times. All employees working with regular radiation and biohazard screenings must also undertake regular urinalysis or radiation check-ups and will be made redundant if missing a check-up. Ironically, this information is given during the tram ride through the Black Mesa Transit System as the tram passes over a robotic loader wading through a pool of some green, likely toxic, material having spilled out of a broken container nearby.

When several members of the Black Mesa Personnel are seen together, they can become very useful allies, as well as providing conversations, together or towards the player, that reveal small parts of the story.

Science Team
The overwhelming majority of Black Mesa's population, the Black Mesa Science Team consists of scientists only.

Security Force
The Black Mesa Security Force is the main component of Black Mesa's support personnel force.

Other personnel

 * Administration personnel - Serving the Office of the Administrator, administration personnel handle the bureaucracy for the facility, including recruiting civilians (Civilian Recruitment Division) and assigning personnel (Support Personnel Division). Known Administrative Personnel include Wallace Breen and L.M..


 * Service personnel - Service personnel are rarely seen in the Half-Life games, but can sometimes be spotted driving forklifts along the Black Mesa Transit System, wearing a red overall and a yellow helmet. Some other tasks impossible to achieve by a human being (such as holding heavy crates or having to go through toxic materials) are also performed by robotic loaders.


 * Military personnel - Although the facility maintains a small military presence, the bulk of the facility's military personnel are the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit who are kept off-site and only sent in as a clean-up crew in case of extreme circumstances.


 * Residents - Are relatives to the corporation's employees, they live with their family members in dormitories. Known residents Azian and Alyx Vance.

Behind the scenes

 * Originally, all Black Mesa employees were to be hostile to the player. The Barney NPC was then used by Valve's Al programmer Steve Bond to run experiments in enemy squad behavior. By putting the player in the role of squad leader, and forcing Barney to follow instead of fight the player, Bond hoped for an easy way to test navigation rules. The unexpected result of this experiment was a working companion character, which instantly appealed to every playtester who saw Barney in action. This caused the team to rethink large portions of the story and Gordon's role in it, and the game was completely overhauled in late 1997. In that process of converting enemies to allies, the team also came to think about characters that were neither allies nor enemies to the player, leading to the creation of the G-Man.


 * Security cards were originally to be picked up in offices or the corpses on Black Mesa's employees, which was replaced by the Retinal Scanner.


 * A cut model, named "construction.mdl", possibly a construction worker, was apparently to be seen in several areas. Mostly based on an early Military Police Barney model, and with yellow outfit and white helmet, its animations suggest it was to be seen in an early version of the Half-Life map " ", inspecting the floor then fleeing from something, apparently climbing on crates. It can be found in the Half-Life and Blue Shift models.

List of appearances

 * Half-Life: Day One
 * Half-Life
 * Half-Life: Uplink
 * Half-Life: Opposing Force
 * Half-Life: Blue Shift
 * Half-Life: Decay
 * Half-Life 2
 * Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar
 * Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
 * Half-Life 2: Episode One
 * Half-Life 2: Episode Two