- Pronouns
- He/They
(the short story in question, in case you somehow haven't seen it yet)“I was deranged,” says Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw of his decision to publish the plot of Episode 3 as fanfiction. “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.”
Shortly into his retirement, in August of 2017, the writer posted an epistolary short story on his website, in the voice of one Gertrude Fremont, PhD. “Dearest Playa,” it began. “I hope this letter finds you well. I can hear your complaint already, ‘Gertie Fremont, we have not heard from you in ages!’ Well, if you care to hear excuses, I have plenty, the greatest of them being I’ve been in other dimensions and whatnot, unable to reach you by the usual means.”
what followed was very clearly recognisable as an outline for an unreleased Half-Life adventure which would wrap up the dangling story threads of Episode 2. The letter was widely interpreted as an admission that players would never get to see this conclusion in interactive form. Today, Laidlaw regrets ever publishing it.
It would have been best, he thinks, to have kept to himself and dealt with his isolation in ways that didn’t reflect on his former employer. “Eventually my mind would have calmed and I’d have come out the other side a lot less embarrassed,” he says. “I think it caused trouble for my friends, and made their lives harder. It also created the impression that if there had been an Episode 3, it would have been anything like my outline, whereas in fact all the real story development can only happen in the crucible of developing the game. So what people got wasn’t Episode 3 at all.” Instead, it was just a snapshot of where Laidlaw was at that time. “Deranged,” he repeats. “There’s really no other explanation.”
i'd highly recommend reading the full interview, as it contains numerous other details relating to the development of the Half-Life series. but this on it's own was worthy of it's own thread.
he was fairly amandent from the beginning that it was merely a possible idea on how the series could continue, and that it could still go on without him.
but people didn't believe him at the time. jump forward three years, and....There are lots of unproduced Alien scripts. The fact they weren't developed did not spell the end of the Alien franchise.
the other important thing to consider is that he was, in fact. making an unrelated Half-Life VR game shortly before his departure. the "Borealis" project.
which he explains in the interview was canned because “It was too early to be building anything in VR,” so he likely left the company with the expectation they would continue to experiment with bringing the IP over to Virtual Reality headsets.
with the general dismissive backlash towards Valve at the time after it was published, it's not surprising he has went on regret publishing the draft in the first place.