Marc Laidlaw wrote 400 Boys in 1981 aged 21, long before he ended up Valve’s lead writer and one of the chief creators of the Half-Life games. The short story was published in Omni magazine in 1983, before it was picked up for Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology and enjoyed a wider audience. On Marc’s website, at the bottom of the short story itself, he points out 400 Boys has probably been read by more people than anything else he’s written, except perhaps Dota 2 seasonal ad copy. Yes, the video game world knows Marc Laidlaw as the lead writer of the Half-Life series. But he’s done a lot more than video games. It’s funny how things work out.
In a post-apocalyptic city where warring gangs follow a bushido-like code of honor, a new gang, the 400 Boys, forces them to unite. A blend of beauty and brutality from Canadian director Robert Valley, whose LDR episode “Ice” won the Emmy for Outstanding Short Form Animation.
“The inspiration for it just came out of walking around,” Marc remembers. “I lived in Eugene, Oregon and there was always the phone poles with the names of bands that were playing in town, and it was just name after name of super cool bands, and I just wanted a way to do that. I just wanted to make up lots of band names. So I came up with the idea of, if I have all these gangs in the story, I can come up with names for all these different gangs and that would be fun. And it was funny. That was kind of the thing that drove a big part of the story, just wanting to make band names.”
Now, over 40 years after 400 Boys was first published, it’s an episode of the fourth season of Netflix’s hugely popular animated anthology series Love, Death and Robots. The episode was directed by Robert Valley, the director of Zima Blue in Season 1 and Ice in Season 2. Tim Miller wrote it. The voice cast includes John Boyega, who famously played Finn in Star Wars. All of a sudden, 400 Boys is having its big moment. Marc Laidlaw never expected this.
“The story kind of faded out, but cyberpunk kept going and I didn’t really think about it that much,” Laidlaw tells me over a video call just days before Season 4 of Love, Death and Robots kicks off on Netflix.
40 years. That’s a long time for anything to be turned into something, isn’t it? But it might have happened earlier, around 15 years ago, when Tim Miller from Blur (the company that does all those fancy video game cutscenes and, these days, so much more), got in touch about maybe turning 400 Boys into something. It didn’t happen. Like so many projects, it fell apart following studio changes.
Then Love, Death and Robots exploded onto the scene in March 2019. This edgy, adult-oriented animated anthology was unlike anything we’d seen on the streamer. Some episodes were challenging, some were weird, some were weirdly challenging. Whatever they were, you couldn’t help but watch. And, Marc noticed, Tim Miller from Blur was involved. “I always say, I can’t imagine anybody else who would’ve turned The Drowned Giant, this J. G. Ballard story, into an episode of an animated feature,” Marc says. “So I had a lot of respect for Tim just from that.”
Marc moved to Los Angeles in 2020 and, as the pandemic eased, met Tim a few times at various events around town. He didn’t want to push 400 Boys, but maybe, just maybe, if this Love, Death and Robots thing kept on going, maybe it would come back around. Then, a year ago, Marc got the ‘would you be interested in us optioning 400 Boys?’ email. It was finally happening.
Marc spoke with Tim, who took over the script, about the story itself. He says the episode is faithful to the source, but there’s some new stuff that helps sell the story visually. He had a couple conversations with Robert Valley, the director. He pointed him to the 400 Boys audiobook, which Marc narrated (“I did a reading of this back in the pandemic when everybody was trying to entertain people by posting audio books of their fiction and stuff on YouTube”).
But really, Marc wasn’t that involved. “It just was fun to sit back and not have to be involved in the trenches on something for once,” he says. “And I just kind of wanted to enjoy it when it was done and see what they made of it.”
And Marc has seen the episode, as you’d expect. “John Boyega and the characters and the accents and the setting is just so cool to me. I mean, they made the story just so much more fun visually, I think.”
400 Boys is, as Marc describes it, from “a different me from lifetimes ago.” Of course it is, he wrote it over 40 years ago when he was a young man. “I’m still pretty happy with it considering how young I was when I wrote it.”
“And then there was a long time of not much happening,” he says. And then, as we all know, Marc got into the games industry in 1997, into Valve as it was making Half-Life. “And that whole thing happened…”
Laidlaw “retired” from Valve in 2016, but it came across as a hard retirement from everything. In truth, he’s in a comfortable enough position to be able to do what he wants, pick his own projects and share them when they’re done. “I think I retired too hard,” he admits. He never wanted to stop being creative. He wanted to get back to writing, but the publishing industry sort of disappeared while he was working on video games. Forget new video games, too. “I can’t do games without a bunch of people. I can’t make a game myself.”
So Marc makes music now. He got a boost in audience after Valve’s Half-Life 2 anniversary documentary came out last year and he released a lost development video from the early days on his YouTube channel. “I’m like, I’m in the wrong business!” Marc jokes. “I should just be leaking information about my old employer.”
Did it feel weird looking back at Half-Life all these years later for the Valve documentary, I wonder?
“Yeah, it was good for me to just kind of process and put a bow on that stuff, see a bunch of old friends, think about that, the whole thing,” Marc says.
“I hadn’t talked to or seen a lot of those people for a long time. I still stay in touch with a few folks, but they’re also not really there anymore. I don’t know what’s going on there right now, but it was fun to hang out with people and talk it over and it was therapeutic.”
With Half-Life and Half-Life 2 anniversary documentaries done and dusted, the only Valve game Marc might be asked to reminisce over now is Dota 2, which, ominously, is 12 years old. Perhaps in eight years Valve will come calling. “I could speak to Dota. That’s the only thing left.” Unless, of course, Valve fancies doing something on Alien Swarm (“I did a little bit on Alien Swarm”).
It is impossible, I find, to talk to Marc Laidlaw without talking about Half-Life. With those Valve documentaries out in the wild, there isn’t much left to say about the past. But maybe (hopefully?!) Half-Life has a future, and it’s that thread I want to pull on.
There is no point asking Marc if he knows whether Half-Life 3 is in the works. As he says, he doesn’t really know the people still left at Valve, but even if he did, he’s not about to announce the game here in our interview. Can you imagine the email Gaben would send if he did?
It is a better use of our time, I think, to ask Marc if he’d ever write for a video game again. Marc says he is, generally, still open to writing for a video game, and suggests Hideo Kojima should perhaps have given him a call. “When Death Stranding came out, I just was grinding my teeth. Like, does he know I’m available? I’d be happy to help do the last polish of dialogue on your script and not wreck anything, but just make it lines that actors would sound better coming out of their mouth.”
Marc, as he alluded to earlier, “retired really hard,” and he thinks that because of that, the industry doesn’t think to ask him to do anything. “When I see the Miyazaki stuff, the From studio stuff, of course you go to George R. R. Martin first if you could. Nobody needs my name on their project to sell copies. But I mean, that kind of thing to me is exciting.”
The lack of interesting offers post-Valve came as something of a surprise, Marc says. “I did kind of expect more interesting offers of stuff to do afterward and was kind of like, ‘this is weird: somebody wants me to write their synopsis for their mobile phone laser tag game.’ It’s like, they don’t know what I do.”
Wait, really? Someone actually asked Marc Laidlaw to write a mobile phone laser tag game after he left Valve? “Those are the kind of things I would get,” Marc admits. “I’m like, ‘I don’t know that I have much to offer you guys, but I mean, I don’t really like to say no to stuff.”
Marc continues: “I haven’t really heard any interesting game offers that seemed right for me. People think of me as, you can come in and write a bunch of stuff for a game. I’m like, ‘do you notice how little writing there was in Half-Life?’ Sort of the point of it was I hated reading in games.”
And then the inevitable interview-closer: if Valve gave Marc Laidlaw a call and said, ‘we want to get the band back together for Half-Life 3,’ would he answer that call?
“I would not do that,” he replies, matter of factly. “I can definitely say I would not do that. Even when I was there, I started to feel like, ‘Oh, now I’m the old guy shooting stuff down.’ 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 need new stuff. We didn’t need me going, ‘Well, the G-Man wouldn’t do that in my day.’ And I found I had to restrain myself. People would get enthusiastic about stuff, and I felt like it was becoming a negative force on some of the creative process.
“I haven’t played the VR Half-Life: Alyx, so I don’t really feel like I can. I don’t know what’s going on with anything. And it is not really my place. God knows what it’s doing in terms of creative process of how to get a great experience that will surprise people. And you have to be right at the edge of what you can do in a moment. And I’m not on that edge anymore. That’s not what’s interesting to me at this point. So I don’t think I’d be good.
“Plus, I’m one of the older guys, maybe not the oldest, but it’s so much work. I mean, I don’t think I could do that anymore. I get into my own things, but it’s not on anyone else’s schedule. And yeah, I’m pretty much done. I mean, maybe not done with games altogether, but definitely the Half-Life part of my life is way behind me.”
So, that’s that. Half-Life is done with Marc Laidlaw, and Marc Laidlaw is done with Half-Life. But there’s a lot more he’s done in the past that’s relevant now. Just look at Netflix making 400 Boys, 40 years later. Maybe, at some point in the future, Netflix will knock on Valve’s door and ask to turn Half-Life into something. Then Marc Laidlaw can go through all this all over again.
“The fact that I got into the cyberpunk thing before it was called cyberpunk, and then I came across this sort of beginning game company that ended up making Half-Life… I’ve been lucky to be a part of these things that just kind of become phenomena.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
