Valve’s Former Lead Talks About ‘Left 4 Dead’ Drama
Valve’s co-op zombie shooter, Left 4 Dead 2 launched just a year after the original game. If you know much about Valve, you know that’s a shockingly fast turnaround for a sequel. And according to the lead on the original Left 4 Dead, the sequel came so quickly because the first game was a “broken thing” that nobody at Valve wanted to continue working on.
The original Left 4 Dead launched on November 18, 2008. And then, almost exactly a year later, Valve’s follow-up shooter, Left 4 Dead 2 launched on PC and Xbox 360. At the time, there was some backlash from fans who felt Valve was abandoning the original game rather than supporting it like the company had done in the past with games like Counter-Strike. Other fans blamed greed. In reality, the sequel was created as a standalone game because Left 4 Dead’s engine was a broken mess that likely would not have supported robust modding and new features or big updates.
In a recent interview with Game Developer, Left 4 Dead lead Chet Faliszek talked about the origins of the first game and the messy development process behind the popular co-op shooter.
“I don’t think outside people can appreciate how broken the Left 4 Dead engine was but still shipped,” Faliszek said. “It loaded each map two or three times in the background.”
According to Faliszek, someone at Valve did try to fix some of these issues but nothing worked, and sometimes those efforts to repair it led to new, different problems, like survivors disappearing from the game. This is why Valve made L4D2 a standalone, self-contained sequel and not just a big update or expansion for L4D1.
“At the time, in 2009, Valve didn’t explain any of this to the public and even promised to support Left 4 Dead alongside the sequel (which it sort of did, before just porting all the maps and content into L4D2 later). This didn’t stop some fans from being mad and suggesting players boycott L4D2.”
Faliszek admits that the decision not to explain the situation was to protect the developers who had worked tirelessly to get the game out the door.
The lead on Left 4 Dead and its sequel has since left Valve and is now building his own spin on the zombie co-op shooter genre, The Anacrusis which is set to leave Early Access on December 5. According to the former Valve developer, who left in 2017, The Anacrusis is focused on what he believes fans of the genre care about most, based on stats he saw at Valve: Working together through levels in the game’s main co-op mode.
“When he’s not working on or playing his new game, Faliszek does go back to Left 4 Dead 2 where fans continue to impress him with their mods.”
“It’s still fun. It still clicks,” explained Faliszek, “and there are so many crazy mods. Oh my god. You can have an understanding of how the game works and then turn it on its head, and it’s just fun and goofy. If you just let people have time with something for long enough, they’re gonna go insane.”