[Update]: The long journey has now come to an end! Black Mesa has been officially released!

It has a been a long and difficult road, with the project seeming quite dead on multiple occasions, yet Black Mesa and its developers have persevered and will soon be reaching the grand finale of their entire journey. According to the latest blog post, the fan re-imagining of the original Half-Life will be releasing in full this March 5th!

You can get a pretty good idea of just what Black Mesa has to offer, as well as how much of an improvement it is over the original, through one of the recent trailers for the Xen chapter. Have a gander:

"The key to doing work for free is it has to be important to you AND it has to be important to other people," reads the rather heartfelt developer update. "For Black Mesa, the quality of the source material, and the excitement of the community when we would post even the smallest amount of media is what kept us going."

"The fact is, all roads are long roads. If you fear that, you’ll shy away from choosing the one that excites you most, and has the biggest reward. Not everyone is going to have reliable friends to pull them onto projects, not everyone is going to have the opportunity to own a video game company, but if there is something you want to accomplish there’s nothing left to do, but to do it. You can not win the game if you don’t play."

"I hope that everyone has something that inspires them as much as Half-Life inspired us. I hope that everyone embraces the setbacks and challenges that come, and I hope no one fears the long road in front of them."

To learn more about Black Mesa, as well follow any future updates, you should hop on over to Steam.