Marc Laidlaw

Laidlaw was born and raised in Laguna Beach, California. He attended the University of Oregon, where he tried, and was discouraged by, punched card computer programming. 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, but he worked as a legal secretary in San Francisco for a living.

Laidlaw had played computer and arcade games, but was not intrigued until he played Myst (1993). He obsessed over Myst and bought a new computer so that he could play it at his San Francisco home. He wrote The Third Force (1996), a tie-in novel based on the world created by the Gadget computer game. His favorite PC game is Thief: The Dark Project.[2]

Working with game designers led him to feel that he wanted to help design an actual game. He joined Valve while they were developing their first game, Half-Life (1998), and worked on the story and level design. After working on further Half-Life games. He announced his departure from Valve in January 2016, stating the primary reason for his departure was his age, and planned to return to writing original stories.[3] On August 25, 2017, Laidlaw published a short story titled "Epistle 3". Journalists interpreted it as a summary of what could have been the plot for a further Half-Life game.[4] He provided consultation during the development of Half-Life: Alyx (2020).[5] Laidlaw has an amateur radio license and his callsign is WH6FXC.[6]

• Official website
• Marc Laidlaw at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database