According to ex-valve Writer Chet Falizek, left 4 Dead President and co-founder Gabe Newell didn’t want to add zombies to the game.
Faliszek recently spoke to YouTube channel Kiwi Talkz, where he touched on a variety of topics, including his Web portals, Anacrusis, and more. Most notably, host Reece Reilly asked Faliszek about his work on Left 4 Dead, particularly how zombie stories often have many clichés and sometimes little room for originality. Initially, this caused Newell to push the team away from the zombies.
“At the time, Gabe and I had dinner and he said ‘If you watch zombie movies, Night of the Living Dead is about racism, Dawn of the Dead is about consumerism,'” Faliszek said. As part of a conversation trying to understand the core concepts of what Left 4 Dead might be, Newell asked “What is your game about?”
“And I love that it’s about working together, it’s the game itself, it’s a reflection of the game,” Faliszek continued. “We’re going to be pushed more and more because I remember [Newell] Saying “Okay, let’s not do zombies, zombies are tacky.” You didn’t have The Walking Dead TV and all that at the time, so it was tacky. “
Faliszek explained how he watched a lot of these classic horror films as a young man, not realizing that some of them were a bit tacky, and decided to make the characters more aware of their environment.
“So I figured why don’t we put the characters and the world together and make some of the characters in the world realize that they’re essentially in a zombie movie. Zoe and Lewis understood, like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is Something in a movie,’ but they play it seriously.”
Considering the reason everyone plays Left 4 Dead is co-op against hordes of zombies, it’s probably a good thing no one’s listening to Newell on this special occasion.
