how is it that black mesa is supposedly more rich and successful than aperture science yet aperture wins in every way when it comes to aesthetic design and logos. did aperture spend all their money on making everything look pretty and ran out of money for profitable science research projects
Actual lore answer: Believe it or not, except for the whole portal-to-Xen-accidentally-ushering-in-the-acpocalypse-and-bringing-in-the-Combine bit - which was due to intentional sabotage - Black Mesa’s technology is all extremely safe, even if it looks dangerous, and all of its workers have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing and why.
Poking the wrong side of a Portal gun can cause you to have retroactively never existed in the first place.
Black Mesa is a typical research facility / company, in other words. Aperture Science is a bunch of more-or-less insane scientists going “I know it’s not actually possible to do this, but what if we did it anyway?” and then doing it anyway and making something impossible, with no idea how or why it does what it does, and then making it look white and clean and pretty and probably full of asbestos, because you can’t go wrong with asbestos. Which is why Aperture Science is better than Black Mesa is basically every possible why.
Short answer: Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what actually happened.
