Marc Laidlaw

Marc Laidlaw is an American writer. Until 2016, he was a writer for the video game company Valve, where he worked on the Half-Life and Portal series.

Before joining Valve, Laidlaw was a novelist working in the fantasy and horror genres. In 1996 he won the International Horror Guild Award for his novel The 37th Mandala. In 2025, Laidlaw's 1983 short story "400 Boys" was adapted as an episode of the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots.

Laidlaw attended the University of Oregon, where he tried, and was discouraged by, punched card computer programming.^{[citation needed]} He wrote short stories and his first novel, Dad's Nuke, was published in 1985. This was followed by several more novels over the next decade, while working as a legal secretary in San Francisco.^{[citation needed]}

While working at the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Laidlaw wrote the novel Dad's Nuke, which he followed with the novels 37th Mandala, Kalifornia and The Orchid Eater. He wrote a series of articles for Wired profiling the video game developer id Software. He was commissioned to write a novelization of the FMV adventure game Gadget by the Japanese developer Synergy. Gadget was unsuccessful, but Laidlaw was excited by the creative process of game development. While writing another profile of id, he began asking about game design and exploring opportunities in the industry.

Laidlaw joined the video game company Valve in July 1997, while they were developing their first game, the first-person shooter (FPS) Half-Life (1998). He was hired to work on another game, Prospero, but switched when Prospero was canceled and the Half-Life project expanded. Laidlaw said his contribution was to add "old storytelling tricks" to Valve's ambitious designs. Rather than dictate narrative elements, he worked with the team to improvise ideas, and was inspired by their experiments. He contributed to the "visual grammar" of the level design, and focused on "doing storytelling with the architecture ... The narrative had to be baked into the corridors."

For Half-Life 2 (2004), the team developed the characterization. Laidlaw created family relationships between the characters, saying it was a "basic dramatic unit everyone understands" that was rarely used in games. He also worked on Half-Life 2: Episode One (2006) and Half-Life 2: Episode Two (2007), plus several canceled Half-Life projects, including Half-Life 2: Episode Three and a virtual reality game set on a time-travelling ship. Laidlaw said he had intended Episode Three to end the Half-Life 2 story arc, at which point he would "step away from it and leave it to the next generation". In 2012, Laidlaw started a Twitter account to tell a story about the Half-Life 2 character Dr Breen. He described the story as "fan fiction", and wrote: "I personally cannot give the world a Half-Life game. All I can personally do, at least for now, is stuff like this."

Laidlaw also contributed to Valve's puzzle series Portal, which is set in the Half-Life universe. He disliked the crossover, feeling it "made both universes smaller", and said later: "I just had to react as gracefully as I could to the fact that it was going there without me. It didn't make any sense except from a resource-restricted point of view."

Laidlaw announced his departure from Valve in January 2016. He said the primary reason for his departure was his age, and that he planned to return to writing stories. He felt he was becoming a "negative force" at Valve and hampering the creative process, saying: "I think at some point you need to let the people who are the fans and the creators who've come in because of what they learned from you maybe, and let them have that. We didn't need me going, 'Well, the G-Man wouldn't do that in my day.'" Laidlaw also said he had tired of the FPS genre and of solving storytelling problems in a Half-Life-style narrative. He said he had "always hoped that we'd stumble into a more expansive vocabulary or grammar for storytelling within the FPS medium, one that would let you do more than shoot or push buttons, or push crates".