How are Portal and "Black Mesa" related?

I have played Portal (loved it), but not Half Life.

First, what is Black Mesa? And how is Portal related to Black Mesa? I know GLaDOS mentions it in the "Still Alive" tribute at the end of the game. But what's the relation? Please feel free to be specific, since I doubt I'd pick up Half Life anytime soon.

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6 Answers

Both Black Mesa and Aperture Science are trying to develop portal technology, they are basically competitors.

Aperture Science develops the portal gun on the Borealis (a research ship, just one of the many places). But the ship disappears. Gordon finds the location of Borealis in HL2 and also finds out that their portal tech is far superior to Black Mesa's.

GLaDOS is made operational in one of Aperture's enrichment centers to portray the power of the new portal tech in Portal 1. Here's a timeline of the events.

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Black Mesa and Aperture Science were competing science research facilities in the same universe. They were rivals, and continually tried to out-do each other.

Aperture ended up falling apart (probably because of the death of its CEO, Cave Johnson), whereas a Black Mesa experiment caused an apocalyptic resonance cascade, throwing the world into the turmoil experienced in the Half-Life series of games.

The references in either game (so far) to the other are generally vague. There have been rumors of the two overlapping more in Half-Life 2: Episode 3, but they're nothing more than rumors.

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Aperture Science and Black Mesa are science facilities in the same universe. And they continually tried to outdo one another. But when Aperture Science created the portal gun (it's full name the "handheld portal device") handheld means that the portal gun is a smaller version of something else bigger and better, something that was probably on the borealis ship. Black Mesa could not make anything better than Aperture Science so they decided to steal the ship.

In Portal 2 you see an empty ship dock. In Portal one, in one of the secret rooms if you put your ear against the wall you can hear Doug Ratman rambling on about something and what I did was slow that down 25% and you hear what he is actually saying. In one part of it he says 'The ship was stolen' which means that Black Mesa has taken it, since they are both rivals in the same universe. I hope you find this useful if you have any questions, just ask me!

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And, one of the prerecorded messages that Cave Johnson leaves is

"Greetings friend. I'm Cave Johnson, CEO of Aperture Science. You might know us as a vital participant of the 1968 senate hearing on missing astronauts, and you've most likely used one of the many products we invented but other people have somehow managed to steal from us. Black Mesa can eat my bankrupt..."

If you look at the last line, you can clearly infer that Johnson blames Black Mesa for his company going bankrupt, and because of the "products we invented but {Black Mesa}... managed to steal".

What I believe is that the portal device on the ship malfunctioned and caused it to be teleported to the arctic, and Cave was saying that Black Mesa did it to make test subjects blame the company to give them a bad rep.

Some people's theroies state that when GLaDos came in charge she released your old friend neurotoxin but only Chell and Ratman survived. Ratman somehow escaped when Chell was in forever suspension in portal 2. Ratman thought Chell could stop GLaDos in the first portal and she did but couldn't escape so Ratman tried to free her but a turret shot him so before he died he made the life support last in Chell,s room the longest befor GLaDos could release th neurotoxin but when everyone except Chell died Black Mesa may have taken advantage or maybe even GLaDos works for Black Mesa. Don't take my word for it as it is just a theory.