In 2017, Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw published a really weird short story that was once intended for Half-Life: Episode 3 (opens in new tab). It's a strange old thing. Eli Vance dies, Dr. Mossman tracks down Borealis, and Gordon and Alix head to Antarctica. Laidlaw made several attempts at disguise, swapping the genders of the characters and changing their names slightly, but it was clear that the story was intended as a resolution to a series famous for its lack of disguise.

Apparently, I was very wrong. 'I was delirious,' Laidlaw says in a new interview with RPS (opens in new tab). 'I was completely disconnected from my friends and creative community of the last few decades, completely out of touch. [Publishing the story] just seemed like a fun thing to do. ...... until I did it."

Laidlaw had just retired at the time and obviously thought he would never work on another major Valve project; the publication, which Laidlaw put out under the name Gertrude Fremont, always had a "what was I doing on the Internet last night?" atmosphere.

It began with an appeal to the reader, "Dear Playa," noting that "I cannot reach you by normal means.

In hindsight, the writer's great regret is that he inconvenienced a former colleague and gave the false impression that the story reflected any completed Half-Life project with a "3" in its name. 'Ultimately, it would have put my mind at ease and saved me the embarrassment,' he said. 'It would have inconvenienced my friends and made their lives more difficult. It also gave the impression that if there had been an Episode 3, it would have been more like my outline. So it wasn't Episode 3 that people got.

"It was deranged," Laidlaw said again. 'There's no other explanation.'

The interview also touches on other Half-Life-related topics, such as the days of trying to find a way to fit the story into the design of an early FPS, and Laidlaw's last project at Valve, an early Half-Life VR game called Borealis He also briefly mentions: "It's very vague and diffuse.

"The point is that every story we did was something we discovered along the way, as a team, not something I had an idea for and somehow drove people to do," Laidlaw says. 'The only way I could come up with a story for a Half-Life game was to make the game, and that's what I did. There is no reason to think that what I put down on paper would lead to the final product.

One tantalizing anecdote is about the coughing, singing Vortigant that players encounter in Half-Life 2. That's a recording from a time when Gabe [Newell] was singing Tuvan throat. He was practicing in elevators and parking lots.

Well, we all have regrets, and if I had been on the island in a position to publish the script for Episode III, I probably would have done the same. But Laidlaw's point about treatment is an important one: even if Valve had started on Episode 3 using this script as a starting point, the final product would almost certainly have been quite different. There is one consolation, however, about the path Laidlaw did not take.