#like yeah they figured out intra-universe teleportation when the combine hasn't

[ghyaps]

I haven't played Half-Life, but I have some understanding of the lore and have played both Portal games, so I think I have enough qualifications to say the following:

How in the SHIT was BLACK MESA the one to destroy the world when APERTURE WAS RIGHT THERE.

They pointed supercolliders at people. They made a laser that turns blood into gasoline and made something else that turns blood into peanut water. Their testing facilities are a bed of asbestos. They had a test that involved "trace amounts of time travel" that ran the risk of completely destroying TIME. And somehow, Aperture's big disaster was putting fiction's cuntiest killer robot in charge of the neurotoxin, and Black Mesa's lead to what might be the single worst fate for humanity i've ever seen outside of IHNMAIMS immediately after, and even then it might be close.

Also, in the Perpetual Testing Initiative, there's a universe where Aperture buys Black Mesa and averts the Black Mesa Incident and the subsequent Combine occupation by shutting down anomalous materials research just because it risked a resonance cascade. Aperture might be a machine gun of OSHA violations but Black Mesa is apparently so much of a shotgun blast to the face that even Aperture "The Chairs Give You Tumors" Science doesn't want to touch a potential resonance cascade with a 5-mile pole.