There was a brief, fleeting moment in history where Left 4 Dead could’ve had no zombies. At least, Valve president Gabe Newell didn’t want any.
During an interview with Kiwi Talkz, former Valve writer Chet Faliszek explains that Newell thought the team should take Left 4 Dead in a different direction (thanks, VG247).
“I went to dinner with Gabe, and he was beating me up with ‘if you look at zombie movies, Night Of The Living Dead is about racism, Dawn Of The Dead is about consumerism’ [George A. Romero] had purposely made those movies [topical],” Faliszek said. “He asked, ‘what is your game about?'”
“And I’m like well, it’s about working together, it’s the game itself, it’s a reflection of the game. In the zombie apocalypse, what are you going to do?” Faliszek explains. “We’d kind of get pushed more and more because I remember [Newell] said, ‘well, let’s not do zombies. Zombies are just cheesy.’ At the time, you did not have [things like] The Walking Dead TV series and all of this, so it was very cheesy.”
However, Faliszek goes on to state that when he saw Dawn of the Dead as a kid, the zombies weren’t cheesy at all. Plus, there are plenty of great survival horror games with zombies too.
“So I was like, why don’t we just take the characters and the world, and make some of the characters in the world aware that they’re in a zombie movie essentially. Zoe and Lewis understand that like ‘oh my god, this is the thing from movies,’ but they play it seriously,” Faliszek concludes.
Check out the entire chat below
It’s hard to imagine one of the best zombie games ever not featuring hordes of shambling undead, so let’s be happy that Faliszek didn’t give in on Newell’s suggestion.
Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.
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