Marc Laidlaw

Marc Laidlaw is an American writer. He is a former writer for the video game company Valve, where he worked on the Half-Life series before his departure in 2016. He has published several novels. 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.