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.

Biography

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.

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. 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. 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 also contributed to Valve's puzzle series Portal, which is set in the Half-Life universe. 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". 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. After leaving Valve, Laidlaw moved to Kauai, Hawaii. Laidlaw also writes and records music.

  • Kalifornia (1993)
  • The Orchid Eater (1994)
  • The Third Force (1996), Gadget game tie-in
  • The 37th Mandala (1996), nominated for the 1997 World Fantasy Award and awarded the 1996 International Horror Guild Award
  • White Spawn (2015)
  • Underneath the Oversea (2018)

Short fiction

<!--;Collections-->

;Stories

{|class='wikitable sortable'

|-

!width=25%|Title

!|Year

!|First published

!|Reprinted/collected

!|Notes

|-

|"Tissue"

|1980

| edited by Ramsey Campbell, 1980

|

|-

|"400 Boys"

|1983

|

|Bruce Sterling, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, 1986

|

|-

|"Dankden"

|1995

|

|

|The Bard Gorlen series

|-

|data-sort-value="perfect wave"|"The Perfect Wave"

|2008

|

|

|

|-

|"Songwood"

|2010

|

|

|The Bard Gorlen series

|-

|"Watergirl"

|2015

|

|

|}

<!-- Move entries below into the table above -->

; The Bard Gorlen series

  • "Catamounts" (September 1996, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
  • "Childrun" (August 2008, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
  • "Quickstone" (March 2009, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
  • "Bemused" (September/October 2013, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
  • "Rooksnight" (May/June 2014, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
  • "Catamounts" (Reprint) (August 2013, Lightspeed)
  • "Belweather" (September 2013, Lightspeed)
  • "Stillborne" (November/December 2017, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
  • "Weeper" (September/October 2020, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
  • "Underneath the Oversea" (November 2020)

Music

  • Sombre Hombre EP (2023)

;Notes

Games

{| class="wikitable"

|-

! Year

! Title

|-

| 1998

| Half-Life

|-

| 2004

| Half-Life 2

|-

|2006

|Half-Life 2: Episode One

|-

|2007

|Half-Life 2: Episode Two

|-

|2013

|Dota 2

|-

|}

References