Marc Laidlaw

Marc Laidlaw is a writer, novelist, and former game designer who worked for Valve Corporation between July 1997 and January 2016.

Marc started writing when he was a child and started selling professionally around 1978, with stories in Omni Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and plenty of other science fiction, horror and fantasy magazines and anthologies. He sold his first novel, Dad's Nuke, in 1984. His next novels were, in order: Neon Lotus, Kalifornia, The Orchid Eater, and The 37th Mandala. He also wrote a tie-in novel for the game Gadget: Invention, Travel & Adventure, called The Third Force: A Novel of Gadget. By the time he wrote The Third Force, he was starting to come heavily under the influence of computer games. During a visit to id Software for a cover-story about Quake he was writing for Wired Magazine, Marc decided that level designers had the coolest jobs on earth.

His background in science fiction writing, as well as his budding interest in game design, led to him being recruited by Valve in summer 1997 to develop the narrative of their debut title, Half-Life. Marc was the sole writer of Half-Life and remained the lead writer on the sequels: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two. He was also set to write Half-Life 2: Episode Three, but the game never came to fruition.

In 2015, Marc led production on a Half-Life VR game called Borealis, which was set on the in-universe ship of the same name and would have featured players exploring the vessel as it travelled backwards and forwards through time, but this project also ultimately fell apart. Marc announced his retirement from Valve on January 8, 2016, citing a need for "a break from the collaborative chaos of game production".

Due to the uncertain fate of the Half-Life series and fans' need for closure following the cliffhanger of Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Laidlaw published a story titled Epistle 3 to his website on August 24, 2017. Describing it as a "snapshot of a dream [he] had many years ago", the story features gender-swapped versions of the series' protagonists Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance venturing to the Arctic in what would have perhaps been the story of Episode Three. Marc now regrets writing Epistle 3, stating that it caused unexpected troubles for his former coworkers. Despite this, Marc maintains a good relationship with the people at Valve, and answered questions from the writers of Half-Life: Alyx regarding the lore of the Half-Life universe during that game's development.