Marc Laidlaw shared a few more details about the cancelled Half-Life 1 addon, "Hostile Takeover", ValveTime.net
mentioned some time earlier.
HL2Episode2, a Reddit user,
contacted Marc with a few questions about this addon. Here is what his answer was:
"It didn't have a story and it wasn't playable all the way through. Shortly before it was cancelled, it changed completely from a regular single player adventure to something where the entire TF team joined you as NPC (like a team of individually skilled Barneys). I think this hastened his cancellation.
Even before that time, I had nothing to do with the story. It was the work of an outside studio. Never wrote a word for it. The high concept was that it was going to be a junior G-man version of the soldier and security guard spin-offs in OpFor and Blue Shift. This indicates how much the notion of the G-man changed over the time. At that point, clearly a lot of people just thought the G-man was some sort of government agent working for an agency with many employees...and you'd play one of them, in the same way Gordon was one of many scientists and Adrian Shephard was one of many many soldiers and Barney Calhoun was one of many security guards. Our notion of the G-man as a unique individual had not really settled into place yet...or not for everyone, The basic idea for the game was Gabe's, as was the idea to make it a TF adventure...he threw a lot of things at the wall and not all of them stuck."