Marc Laidlaw considers himself deranged for what he did in 2017.

That’s when the former Half-Life writer released a short story that was supposed to be the basis for the storyline of Half-Life 3 (or Half-Life 2: Episode 3…?). Eli Vance is dead, Dr. Mossman tracks down the Borealis, Gordon, and Alyx go to Antarctica, and sure enough, everything goes wrong. Laidlaw tried to change the characters’ genders and slightly alter their names, but however he hid it, the trick was almost immediately apparent. Fans put the puzzle together in no time…

“I was deranged. I lived on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community over the last couple of decades. I was ultimately out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. [Publishing the story] just seemed a fun thing to do… until I did it. Eventually, my mind would have calmed, and I’d have come out less embarrassed. 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. All the actual story development can only happen in the crucible of developing the game.

So what people got wasn’t Episode 3 at all. Deranged. There’s no other explanation. It’s important to say that every story we did was a thing we discovered along the way as a team and not as something I had an idea for and somehow drove people to execute. The only way to figure out the story for a Half-Life game was to make the game. There’s no reason to think a thing I put down on paper was going to bear any relation to a final product,” Laidlaw said in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun.

In the interview, he also mentioned the singing vortigaunt we encountered in Half-Life 2. Its performance ended with a coughing fit. Laidlaw explained that it was from Gabe Newell’s Tuvan throat-singing days. He practiced this in the elevator and garage, and Valve recorded his performance. Oh…

Source: PCGamer