Marc Laidlaw

Marc Laidlaw (born 1960) is an American writer of science fiction and horror and also a computer game designer with Valve Software. He is perhaps most famous for writing Dad's Nuke and The 37th Mandala, and for working on the popular Half-Life series.

Biography
Laidlaw was born in 1960 and raised in Laguna Beach, California and attended the University of Oregon where he tried, and was discouraged by, punch 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. It was not until Myst that his perception of these games changed. He obsessed over Myst and bought a new computer so that he could play it at his San Francisco home. With his new-found interest, he wrote The Third Force (1996), a tie-in novel based on the world created by the Gadget computer game. His favorite PC game of all time is Thief: The Dark Project.

Working with game designers led him to feel that he wanted to help design an actual game. He joined Valve while they were developing Half-Life and worked on the game's story and level design. At Valve, he later worked on the Half-Life's expansions (even though his precise input is not clearly known) and Half-Life 2 and its episodes. The latter episodes were co-written with the creators of Old Man Murray, Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek, whom he shares an office with at Valve. All three also co-wrote the story for Portal.

Trivia
In the locker room at the start of Half-Life, several Easter Eggs can be found: each locker except Freeman's shows a name of a Valve employee, including Laidlaw. Also, in Gordon Freeman's locker the books The Orchid Eater and The 37th Mandela can be found.