Марк Лэйдлоу: Американдық жазушының өмірі мен шығармашылығы

American writer

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 genres, and in 1996 won the International Horror Guild Award for his novel The 37th Mandala.

Laidlaw 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, while working as a legal secretary in San Francisco. 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. He wrote The Third Force (1996), a tie in novel based on the world of the Gadget computer game.

Laidlaw joined the video game company Valve while they were developing their first game, the first person shooter (FPS) Half Life (1998). He was originally hired to work on another game, Prospero, but switched when Prospero was canceled and the Half Life project expanded. Rather than dictate narrative elements, he worked with the team to improvise ideas, and was inspired by their experiments. 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. Laidlaw 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 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. Laidlaw later said he had tired of the FPS genre and of solving the problems of storytelling 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". 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 the story had created problems for his former colleagues at Valve. After leaving Valve, Laidlaw moved to Kauai, Hawaii.