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Source: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/half-life/932135p1.htmlGameSpy: Who or what were your inspirations for Gordon Freeman?
Marc Laidlaw: Well, we knew generally that he was supposed to be a scientist, and this was immediately an interesting and appealing challenge as a writer. Really, the only other examples we had in the games at the time were like the Quake marine and Duke Nukem, so it was pretty easy to find something that wasn't one of those. It seemed like a pretty obvious thing to do since we were doing a science-fiction game. There's this scientist, he's not perfect, and there's a disaster, and it's all going to be the fault of the scientist. There was no shading about maybe you're doing these things because you're encouraged to or things have been set up to go against you. So, I think we didn't want to do a big backstory about the guy, we wanted to kind of leave it blank.
Then we decided to take a look at sort of heroic scientific figures. The name Freeman Dyson came up, and Gabe had already come up with the name Gordon. We played around with silly names like Dyson Pont Carre and silly stuff like that, but we ended up with Gordon Freeman. The main thing was not to put too much detail into really specific things about this character because we always wanted the player to help create who he was. We had a resume of sorts to help explain what he was doing there, which was why we came up with M.I.T. and Seattle and the University of Innsbruck and these things that we kind of dispersed as little bits of information about Gordon. But the main thing was that we just tried to stay out of the way.
It was even sort of a sad thing when we had to do a multiplayer model and show Gordon, or when we had to have his image on the box or the launcher. I remember that there was a review, and I totally sympathize with it, that talked about the level of disappointment that the reviewer felt when they actually saw Gordon Freeman on the game's launcher screen. You don't really want to take it this far, you just want to be this person and kind of imagine, like in a dream. What do you look like in a dream? Well, you want that to be what this character looks like.
He's become a visually iconic figure, but the original intention was more idealized, that it would be cool if we didn't show Gordon at any time, we'd just let the player create their own. I mean, we tell you that you're a scientist, but we don't do a lot of work to convince you that you're actually doing science in the game. That's sort of a tease, that we have Gordon involved in another experiment after the last one he did didn't turn out too well.
GameSpy: Gordon's not a tough guy, but Half-Life 2 makes some interesting observations on the nature of his actions (always tearing down, never building up)... can you elaborate on this theme? Is this more of a commentary on gaming in general or was this insight considered specific to Gordon Freeman's character?
Marc Laidlaw: [Laughs] That's actually just Dr. Breen messing with Gordon's head. There was a leap between Half Life and Half-Life 2, where Gordon could be this slaughterer of scientists and he could get the scientist killing club. We took the leap from actual human realism and started giving him allies that you couldn't kill, and it became less of a game about saving the world single-handedly, or screwing it up single-handedly, and more about the goals of larger groups.
It's kind of an inside joke to the gaming community, that that's basically all you can do in these games. I mean, it's not Robin's Cooperative Building Game, it's this other thing that involves shooting and whacking stuff with crowbars. That's the role you have to play in the game, so having Dr. Breen comment on that was kind of a fun side joke that we put in there, to make you feel about doing the thing that we forced you to do anyway. Sort of like the initial test chamber disaster. We force you to do it, then we try to make you feel bad about it, as if you had a choice.
GameSpy: How much of the Half-Life universe was defined when the first game came out? Did ideas for jumping forward to City 17 in Half-Life 2 already exist, or was the story mostly confined to what was in the game?
Marc Laidlaw: The first game was really totally self-contained. The idea that we were going to do a sequel to it... I'm really sequel averse in my own work. I think we thought that we'd do this, then we'd create a whole new world, we'd go and do something else. That didn't take into account the fact that Half-Life was going to be a success. We were prepared to let go of it and try something new. Initially Half-Life was supposed to be this quickie FPS that would give the company a resume and get us on our feet to do whatever the real thing was that we were going to do. We could learn some stuff doing this, then we'd do some other thing.
So, one of the problems in embarking on Half-Life 2 was that Half-Life was this hermetic world, and it says nothing about the world outside of Black Mesa. Whatever we were going to come up with was going to be totally arbitrary. Fortunately, in that seed of Half-Life, there were some really recognizable things, like the science team. We were in this situation that we could make a world from scratch and basically do a totally new thing, but we had these transportable elements. As long as we had the core science team and this Kleiner guy and these characters from Black Mesa, you could put them anywhere and it's still going to feel like Half-Life. They're like a family for Gordon, they give him social context and they make you feel like you're continuing this adventure, even though it's in the middle of a bunch of aliens you've never heard of before. We worked hard to convince you that this is a struggle that we had hinted at in the first game.
It's always like that. I think even if you set out to do a sequel, you get the most mileage out of the things that were planted in the first one and weren't really intended to go anywhere. After a while, you'll go "Oh, we put this in here and it wasn't meant for this, but it's the perfect thing to extend the story." There are little seeds that grow. As we went on, we looked at things from the first game that were just perfect for ripening and making something out of them episodes later. There's also sort of a fun satisfaction of making these pieces feel like they were inevitable from the start, to go back to these earlier elements and weave them all back into the larger picture.
We've always tried to take that world into account. These things happened, and that's how they happened, and we're not going to try to say they didn't just so we can do something farther out with the story. So we kind of have to play by those rules that we established.
Obivously, if you were still looking at the same aliens from the original game at the end of the episodes where we are now, it would be sort of tedious, so we tried to suggest that there's a larger universe of stuff out there. You're still in that universe, but there's a lot of stuff that you just didn't get to see before.
GameSpy: You mentioned the idea of Gordon's supporting characters as his family. Are there any plans to expand on their stories?
Marc Laidlaw: Well, there's always a lot more we could do with the characters. We haven't announced any plans for that, but the lives of all of those characters, especially for those of us who have been living with them for a long time, are much more complicated than what we could fit in a game. There's always going to be stuff we wish we could do with them, and if the opportunity came up, I'm sure we'd like to do that provided we could do it in a game. The really clever thing about it is that, and this was Gabe's idea originally, was that when we were looking at doing a sequel to Half-Life, and how to do expanision packs, the typical thing would be to have just done a sequel. He hit on this sort of Alexandria quartet type of idea where we give these characters the "Rashomon" treatment and tell the same story from the perspectives of the different characters.
What was great about that is that Gearbox was able to reuse the exact same textures and models and everything from Half-Life, but just concentrate on the gameplay and narrative elements, so they wouldn't go into an area that we weren't ready to go into yet. The whole timeline beyond Half-Life was pretty scary for us, as we were trying to figure just where we wanted to go with it. It was a really clever reuse of resources, and it kept it consistent with the universe. We're kind of in a different zone right now, trying to make sure it all fits.
That's one reason we've taken on the episodes by ourselves, rather than turn them into an expansion pack for a third-party company. We wanted to make these episodes indispensible and really advance the story with major parts of the plot and put the characters through changes. Half-Life 2 set the groundwork for these changes, but one game itself in the time it takes is just not enough to show change in a character.
We're very careful about how we advance these pieces. It's harder to say that we're going to just peel off these characters and go do separate games with them. We like the element of careful control and attention to detail on how we develop them. From my point of view, a lot of it has to do with what we do with these characters. Obviously we could take game elements and other people could say "Okay, I want Alyx fighting robots on the moon." I don't really see Alyx in that kind of struggle, but maybe there's a game there!
GameSpy: One thing we've been seeing recently is books or other media based around games, like with Mass Effect, Halo, and Gears of War. Was there even any talk about bringing the Half-Life universe into other forms of media?
Marc Laidlaw: There's been talk about it and there's certainly been fan requests and inquiries from publishers. What we always come back to is the fact that we want control over where the universe goes and where the characters go. Part of that is sort of the professional and personal challenge of wanting to do things in these games that you can't do in a book or movie. That just boils down to the medium: What can we do in games that we can't in other mediums? We're doing some things that can't be done in other forms.
If these games are done right, books are irrelevant. You'd just be reading a transcript of the game you just played, minus the cool stuff, which is the stuff you did to influence it. If you were to watch somebody play through Half-Life 2, transcribe their experiences, then turn it into a descriptive narrative, as well-written as possible, that might be interesting to read. My initial feeling was that we would never do these as books, because this is something that's different and complete in itself. Then, at one point, we realized we had so much material from the universe that we could do books, we could do books, we could fill in the gaps for things that the games don't really give us the breathing room to do or develop.
But now I've returned to the feeling that the games are so much better at doing what they do than books would be. Books are fine without having to have a bunch of "Half-Life" tie-in novels to go along with them. I think with the Halo universe, they can pick a point in the larger universe that they've built and say, "You can set a book here, it won't affect the game that we're building." We're trying to say the experience you're having playing Half-Life is the crucial experience to have in the Half-Life universe. We're putting you in the middle of it. Gordon Freeman is this catalyzing guy who is at the center of history right now. The things that are happening to him are affecting the whole universe right now, so why would you want to be the guy who's working in the office building a few blocks over?
It's partly that, and seeing how far we can go with our storytelling technique. It makes sense for some worlds. I've done a tie-in novel, so I'm not against them. The one that I did was developing a universe, that there was already a visual element, and they wanted a video element and they wanted a novel element as well, they wanted to fuse though things. It's possible that it could happen, as they do pretty well, especially for those big franchises, so there's certainly interest in it, but I'm not sure it would make sense from a storytelling point of view. The other side of that is that if it wasn't me writing it, we'd want the person writing it to be here working on the games anyway, in which case we'd want to take the benefit of that and put it into the games, which I think is what our fans want.
GameSpy: How does it feel to go back and look at Half-Life? Does it still hold up?
Marc Laidlaw: Well, visually it seems a little, um, shaggy. [Chuckles] We've had quite a few new hires recently, and about a year ago one of our former WETA artists who's here had played Half-Life 2 but not the original Half-Life. So we were kind of taking him through the story of the first game, and he watched the test chamber sequence and totally got sucked into it. This was the reason that people wanted Half-Life 2 and Valve is here today. It's kind of sustained itself. If you go back to the core, you have to overlook a lot of stuff, but I think a lot of it is still pretty fun.
GameSpy: How do you feel personally to be a creator of one of the games that is always mentioned when people talk about innovative story-driven shooters?
Marc Laidlaw: I'm really proud with what we did with Half-Life. It's become the sort of benchmark game for storytelling in a shooter which, at the time, was like baby steps. There's not a lot of dialogue or characters, it's just sort of boiled-down shorthand for narrative, most of which takes place through level design and puzzle design and that type of architecture. The plot is the architecture you're moving through. It's part of the old school of level design, and I always think of great moments in games like Hexen, where you'd push a button in one place and it would say "The door is open to the seven portals." To me, that was just as amazing as any plot.
That's something I'm always mindful of. I came to Valve to work on games, and to do this thing with games, where the technology was cool, the animation was neat, and we had weapons and gameplay and puzzles that were great. I just wanted the story element to be appropriate and sort of stand side-by-side with those things and be as good as they were. It wasn't really an attempt to push storytelling into the industry, because one could look at adventure games and all the other types of games that I took inspiration from and see that they were already doing that. People were doing storytelling in other types of games, just not in shooters.
Having succeeded at that to the point that people, even 10 years later, are still pointing to it as an example of storytelling, feeling like we're getting better at it in our following games is something I'm really proud of. It's still an exciting challenge. I don't think you really see people doing things the Valve way in terms of storytelling and narrative. It's hard. The way we do it in Half-Life is really only appropriate for Half-Life, so it remains an interesting challenge to figure out how to take what we've learned and continue to progress that.
GameSpy: We know you probably can't say much about this, but are there further plans for the franchise beyond Episode 3?
Marc Laidlaw: It's an open universe. I don't think the universe necessarily comes to an end at any point. I mean, the jump from Half-Life to Half-Life 2 was still "Half-Life," but we got to perform this act of world creation, which was really exciting. We've been in that world for a long time now, and building worlds is something I really love to do. I think a lot of people here are like that. Hopefully there will be a transition similar to that, sort of like a rejuvenation or a reinvention, even if we're continuing with more "Half-Life" it's going to have some kind of new world creation involved in it. Whether the world we build is called Half-Life 3 or some completely new thing, where we take what we've learned about storytelling and do it in a new IP, I don't know. Right now, we're just trying to do the right thing by Half-Life and we hope people are happy with that.
GameSpy: Last question: What is a resonance cascade?
Marc Laidlaw: [Laughs] Well, the best way to explain it is probably to live through one. The scientists who could explain it to you didn't survive, and Gordon's not talking.
