What they set out to do over the next few years of constant playtesting and iteration was blend two seemingly opposed objectives: emergent, co-op gameplay and a dramatic interactive experience that would mimic the peaks and trough of a horror movie. We’d come from the background of Counter-Strike and we wanted to create something that was infinitely replayable.” But we immediately ran into the fact that players are smart and they memorise all that stuff. “We wanted certain things to happen at certain places, sort of the traditional scripting methods of having dramatic experiences.
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“We realised we had this nugget of gameplay where a small co-operative group had to deal with hundreds of melee monsters,” explains Booth, a veteran programmer with a passion for AI systems. Together, the two studios proceeded to thrash out where to take the prototype. It was a brilliant piece of co-op matchmaking, Turtle Rock’s formidable AI skills combining with Valve’s passion for storytelling (Valve eventually acquired Turtle Rock in January 2008).
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“It’s you and your buddies – its co-op, it’s social, you’re hanging out laughing and having fun and these horrible things are happening and coming at you.”Īlthough cut from the finished game, the Screamer lives on: his horde-attracting abilities evolved into the Boomer’s vomit attack, while his ear-piercing vocals are used to announce each horde wave during the finale events.īy that afternoon, Valve’s CEO Gabe Newell had heard about the prototype and offered Booth the assistance of Faliszek and Wolpaw in developing it further. “It captured the thing we always loved about the zombies,” says Faliszek. Big deadheads, who’d worked on an unrealised online text game called Zombie World in the ’90s, they instantly saw the appeal. When Booth showed the prototype to Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, the Valve staffers couldn’t stop playing it.
LEFT 4 DEAD ZERO MOD
Terror Strike was a B-movie horror mod that saw a team of counter terrorists planting zombie bait on a night version of the CS: Italy map, then fending off an overwhelming horde of living dead. L4D began in the offices of Turtle Rock Studios in 2004, just after Valve’s favourite Orange County developers had shipped Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. It’s the ultimate online co-op experience, a game that requires not just headshot skills but communication, collaboration and confidence in your fellow player. The infected are just a pretext for collapsing the social order and forcing people to depend on one another to survive. Just like in the best zombie movies, the real drama in L4D lies in the relationships between the living, not the dead. We decided to call that an outlying data point and just hoped it never happened again!” I think they thought the first one knew what they were doing so they followed. “The other three just inexplicably followed him. “The first one just jumps off the roof and ledge hangs,” remembers Faliszek. Then there was the time when four newbies spawned on the rooftop at the beginning of the No Mercy map and turned into lemmings. There were the LAPD cops who arrived in full-on bravado mode and were instantly turned into zombie chow. A few would just wait for the moment to stab you in the back.”Īsk Valve staff about their favourite playtest moments and the stories come thick and fast. Other guys just wanted to help out and make sure everyone had health kits. “Some people would declare themselves the leader and bark instructions, whether they were qualified to or not.
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“It was kind of like watching a lab rat experiment,” recalls Mike Booth, then CEO of Turtle Rock Studios, where L4D originated. When the L4D team began running external playtests for its horror shooter, it was shocked by what players got up to. Everyone gets zombies: they’re dead or infected, they shamble or charge, and they want to eat your brains.