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Half-Life dev Marc Laidlaw explains the making of the game’s opening sequence

– Former Valve staffer Marc Laidlaw, chatting with Arcade Attack about the making of Half-Life’s memorable “another day at the office” opening sequence.

The opening sequence of Valve’s debut game Half-Life is (in)famous for its mundanity: man riding tram is late to work, man moves object from one room to another, man causes cataclysmic rift in the space-time continuum.

In a recent chat with enthusiast website Arcade Attack, Valve veteran (and, as of last year, former employee) Marc Laidlaw offered a bit of interesting perspective on how that sequence was planned that fellow devs may find intriguing.

Notably, it wasn’t really planned at all — like so many things in game dev, it was all sort of cobbled together on flights of inspiration using assets and tools that had already been made. Here, Laidlaw tells the story:

These sorts of anecdotes are important to share because they both illuminate a game’s development history (especially critical here, given that Valve itself lost some of the records of Half-Life’s production) and demythologize the making of an influential work. A generation of game developers were inspired by what they played of Half-Life; in thinking back to the game’s final year of development, Laidlaw remembers “there was lots of dread and anxiety and doubt.”

You can (and should!) read the rest of his comments over on the Arcade Attack website. For a bit more insight into how Half-Life was created, check out our 1999 postmortem of the game. 

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