'Left 4 Dead' Wasn't Originally Going To Have Zombies

Valve is responsible for some of the best games ever made for the PC, and it's partly to blame for the onslaught of zombie-related stuff we've been dealing with since the beginning of the ‘2010s. That's mainly because of the Left 4 Dead series duology,  two games so good they still enjoy a very strong player base nowadays. Interestingly, Chet Faliszek, longtime Valve writer and now helmer of The Anacrusis, a cooperative shooter inspired by L4D reveals in a new interview that it was actually very hard to get zombies in Left 4 Dead.

Back when the game was released in 2008, however, not many people cared about zombie stuff, and Gabe Newell, Valve's overlord, thought zombies were lame and tired. Boy, this past decade must have been tough for him (because it must have been hard to find a place to store all the money). He didn't want zombies in the game because zombies as envisioned by Romero's classic tales always served a specific purpose. In his movies, the problem was never the zombies themselves. They were a but a tool to show some of humankind's worse traits, like racism, capitalism, and biker gangs. He believed that making a game that's straight-up about zombies would be missing the point, so he challenged Faliszek to get him to believe in the zombie idea. Faliszek said it wouldn't be about zombies, but about player cooperation. The rest is history. To show just how much of an achievement L4D really is, we need to remind ourselves that last year we saw the release of Back 4 Blood, a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead 2, one that has so far failed to even get close to L4D 2's current (not peak) player counts.

Anyone looking for a game that captures the essence of Left 4 Dead, and actually does so without the zombies, should perhaps give The Anacrusis a try. 

Top Image: Valve