"Black Mesa isn't a remake, it's a remix. That's what four members of the team responsible for the Half-Life mod told the Penny Arcade Report this week. The audio analogy doesn't stop there, either. Much of the team's work has been focused on creating new story content and that means new lines to be recorded for the player to hear. Gathered onto what was collectively referred to as a virtual beanbag chair was Carlos Montero, project lead; Mark Abent, programmer; Ben Truman, story lead; and Mike Hillard, voice actor. Truman was clearly excited when I asked about his work. I told him it surprised me that someone could be considered story lead on a game that had been written 14 years ago. “I got a lot of flak for that when people asked me, they were like, 'So you hit Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V, or what?' The first Half-Life is known for its storyline so of course we preserved that, but there are a lot of things that were introduced with all the different Source games as the engine developed, so we wanted to take advantage of that functionality.”
“The NPCs in Half-Life 2 are very different from the NPCs in Half-Life 1. They've got a lot of chatter, ways that they communicate information to the player, and they interact with the world around them,” Truman explained. In other words, Black Mesa is not a straight translation of the original Half-Life. In the near decade and a half that has passed since Half-Life's release, many lessons have been learned."
Read the whole interview HERE.