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Marc Laidlaw is an American writer. He is a former lead writer for the video game company Valve, where he worked on the Half-Life series before his departure in 2016. Before joining Valve, Laidlaw was a novelist working in the fantasy and Horror fiction genres, and in 1996 won the International Horror Guild Award for his novel The 37th Mandala.
Laidlaw had played computer and , but was not intrigued until he played Myst (1993). He obsessed over Myst and bought a new computer so that he could play it. He wrote The Third Force (1996), a tie-in novel based on the world of the Gadget computer game.
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 (2006) and (2007), plus several canceled Half-Life projects, including 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."
On August 25, 2017, Laidlaw published a short story titled "Epistle 3", describing it as "a snapshot of a dream I had many years ago". Journalists interpreted it as a summary of what could have been the plot for Half-Life 2: Episode Three, though Laidlaw later denied this. In 2023, Laidlaw said he regretted publishing the story. He said he had been "deranged" and "completely out of touch" at the time, and that it had created problems for his former colleagues at Valve. Valve released a new game, , in 2020. As of 2023, Laidlaw had not played it and said: "I don't ever need to see another Combine soldier again, not even in VR." He said he would not be interested in returning for future Half-Life games, but remained open to working on other game projects.
In 2018, Laidlaw completed a new novel, Underneath the Oversea, but could not find a publisher and self-published it on Kindle. He said the publishing world had "forgotten who he was" and that his age prevented publishers from building a new audience. In 2025, Laidlaw's short story "400 Boys", published in 1983, was adapted as an episode of the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots. Laidlaw was not involved in the production, and said "it just was fun to sit back and not have to be involved in the trenches on something for once".
| "400 Boys" | 1983 | Bruce Sterling, , 1986 | ||
| "Dankden" | 1995 | The Bard Gorlen series | ||
| "The Perfect Wave" | 2008 | |||
| "Songwood" | 2010 | The Bard Gorlen series | ||
| "Watergirl" | 2015 |
| 1998 | Half-Life |
| 2004 | Half-Life 2 |
| 2006 | |
| 2007 | |
| 2013 | Dota 2 |
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