VALVE, TURTLE ROCK, AND 28 DAYS LATER CHANGE THE WORLD. (And why Back 4 Blood was “Left For Dead”)
History
(Hold for applause for the clever wording in the title…lol). Alright, let’s get to it. Left for Dead, or “Left 4 Dead” proper, was released in 2008 by Valve South, more commonly known as Turtle Rock Games, but to understand the story you have to go back further than that. Turtle Rock studios was a small company that was known for working for Valve on a contract basis on games like Condition Zero, the Xbox Port of Counter Strike, and also working on Counter Strike : Source which was the start of a new phase for both studios in my opinion, the Source engine. This engine became famous and Turtle Rock saw the capabilities of this engine and started working on a passion project leveraging the Source Engine to make a game they had toyed around with for a while. The team at Turtle Rock had always worked on competitive games, so they wanted to focus on making a game that was mainly a co-op game. At first the game grew using assets from the source code of CS, then the team saw 28 Days Later. This shifted them away from developing something using all the assets from CS and changed their mindset to building something completely new. A little idea that would come to be called Left 4 Dead. Valve learned of the idea and chose to back them. Development began in 2005, it was announced in 2006, and released in November of 2008. January of 2008, I think Valve could see the writing on the wall and knew this game was something special. They bought Turtle Rock (keep this in mind) studios and they were renamed Valve South. Of course now a part of Valve, they had access to all the tools and funding that came with that, and the L4D series is clearly an example of how amazing something can be with enough funding, and the right people working on something they're passionate about.
I have played A LOT of games. Even back in 2008 I had played a lot of games. But the formula L4D brought to the table, the gameplay loop, the ability to pick up and play for just like 30 minutes, but also to play all day if you wanted. The fast paced action mixed with the chaos, violence and gore, all with the elegant backdrop of sites and settings you can relate to and easter eggs in the safe rooms and hidden throughout the sandbox maps that are just littered with details that veteran players can appreciate. The gameplay is so fast and wild that on harder difficulties you don't have the time to notice, but there are tons of little nuggets of details and info everywhere about this world you're playing in and what happened to cause this. There's even a nod in another Valve game, Payday2, hinting that a bank heist depicted in that game and played out by the player characters are at the very least partially responsible. I LOVE a developer, studio, ARG or game catalog that makes the player feel like they're part of the experience and actually have real agency in this world that's being crafted in real time. A little over a year after the games launch, on top of updates, the Valve team dropped “Crash Course”, a whole new campaign (levels consisting of a few acts, more on this in gameplay). Wildly, not too long after this, Left 4 Dead 2 came out in November 2009. Valve said that all of the ideas they had for this franchise were just too much to cram into L4D and they released the sequel with a new band of survivors, special infected, weapons and locations to play. This was initially met with some criticism from players of course, being asked to shell out another wad of cash for a sequel only a year later seemed to be a bit much but before long the games were more or less melded into one game. Even now on Steam they're basically one launcher where all campaigns from both L4D and L4D2 are launched in the same .exe, and many of the campaigns allow you to run any mix of survivor. Soon the game had all the content from the original, the Crash Course DLC, all of the content from L4D2, and by 2012, there was the Passing, The Sacrifice, and Cold Stream DLCs. The former 2 involved the survivor parties from 1 and 2 meeting up, cooperating with each other at different points and unknowingly affecting the other parties' stories across the story which made the people you were playing as feel real and more lifelike. In 2020, out of nowhere seemingly (more on that later) the Last Stand DLC was dropped. This was a community built scenario that Valve greenlit for official release that included 20 new Survival mode maps, a whole new Campaign that almost acted as a What If scenario for Death Toll (I believe….could be wrong), and a multitude of other QoL/updates to the game. One thing that is great about these games, and a lot of Source Engine/Valve titles is the modding community is fantastic. This is where this story takes an interesting turn…
Basically on the cusp of L4D2’s Launch, Valve and their now in house team, Valve South (Turtle Rock) were having a lot of issues. Some of the folks from the original Turtle Rock team moved to Seattle to work with Valve closer, and some stayed put. But things started to deteriorate. The Valve South/Turtle Rock folks were getting sick of how long it took to pass changes through a larger company like Valve. Eventually this led to the CEO of Valve, Gabe Newell, proposing that they leave Valve. Of course, the L4D IP stayed with Valve, but Turtle Rock was able to take its name and logo back. This was confirmed not long after L4D2 was released, and from here Turtle Rock began to work on other things, while Valve continued to support and work on the L4D IP and supply updates, content, and maintain the gigantic phenomenon that was L4D 1 and 2. I'm not sure on the nature of the split and when the team at Valve south stopped working on the sequel, but I will say there is a notable difference in tone and in presentation in 2. I remember playing the demo of 2 and was relatively undecided on how I felt about it. I liked the updated melee combat and the new weapons (notably the suppressed SMG) but something felt off to me. Eventually when they added the first game's content, and future changes did make the game feel better, BUT in my opinion the first game was still the crowning achievement of the IP, and after all the second games updates came to the first games campaigns, it added fresh life to those with new ways to play and a reason to explore them again. I like the cajun vibe of the second game and going through Louisiana, it was a cool change of pace and feel, but the campaigns and aesthetic of the first game is still undefeated. Somewhat a tangent but more to the point, as I learned all of this info it was relatively apparent that the people responsible for L4D were not necessarily the ones at the helm of L4D2, which happened to be more or less true. Anyways, while all this was happening, Turtle Rock finished their work on “The Sacrifice” campaign and DLC in 2010, and their partnership was over. Fitting in a way, because the sacrifice for all intents and purposes, the sacrifice is the end of the story for the survivors of L4D (No spoilers, but good LORD what an ending…just look at the title of the campaign…). After some strange games (Leap Sheep? WTF) came Evolve. This game on its own was definitely an interesting take on an asymmetrical shooter with some common tones from something like the versus mode in L4D. It seemed like a good idea with some fun gameplay mechanics, but eventually the player base dwindled and the game was put into maintenance mode. Eventually the game went free to play as “Evolve Stage 2” which was also quickly shut down not long after in September 2018. In 2022, multiplayer servers came back online per 2K games, the publisher, and they distributed free keys on a Discord Server “Evolve : Reunited”, but in July of 2023, the game went down, one last time. This kind of seems like the Turtle Rock special post L4D. Very cool premise for games, interesting ideas, but the execution after the Valve days has seemed just not always there. While 2K was puppeting the corpse around of Evolve, Turtle Rock was working on what they were selling as the spiritual successor to L4D, named cleverly, Back 4 Blood. This game brought all kinds of new features to a similar albeit damn near a copy and pasted formula from L4D, which isn't bad on its own. Games like Vermintide 1 and 2 did that and were great games. But, what IS bad are things like the 40k sister game to Vermintide, Darktide, which was launched an incomplete buggy mess with repetitive and uninspired gameplay and gameplay systems that at first seemed at least new, but soon became just another annoying artificial mechanic to inflate a relatively vacant content pool. You may ask what's worse than that, WELL, doing all of that and not ever improving it…Darktide today is leagues better than it was and is not a stain on the studio who made it, but Back for Blood however, has been completely abandoned and is currently on maintenance mode. That on its surface is relatively deserved but is indeed sad bc some of the systems in game, and the ability to change your weapon attachments and somewhat change your character abilities via the card system was at least interest enough to play through the game once, but same as Evolve, after the initial experience, these systems lost their luster and a reason to log in was hard to come by.
Gameplay
The gameplay loop of the L4D games was simple, but not in a bad way. There was something to be gained by playing maps over and over again for a multitude of reasons. You could learn the layout of the map so playing on harder difficulties you would have a relative advantage. BUT, even with knowledge of map layouts and all, you would still have challenges due to the procedural spawns of loot, zombies, and other quest/game based objectives as well as revive locations for survivors. There is an overarching story is there but mostly the game exists in short bursts between safe room rushes. Combat in the game is slightly varied. Different firearms are good at different things with more basic firearms and supplies found early on in a campaign with progressively better loot being found in later stages of the run. The melee combat was a welcome addition to the game, however in my experience it makes most difficulties trivial until the higher tiers. What made the higher difficulty engaging for me was how it changed the gameplay up a bit. It became less about run and gun and more about strategy. Taking advantage of choke points, staging gas cans and propane tanks to have entry denial, and making sure all the survivors in the party are running weapons and equipment that complimented each others to maximize as teams chances on making it out. In my opinion this was L4Ds greatest strength (Versus mode was ok, but co-op is what it was all about) was how versatile the game itself was. Playing on a normal difficulty was relatively challenging, but was easy enough to allow you to take it easy and experience other weapons and strategies. Inversely, you could crank up the difficulty and the whole feeling changed. This was the biggest misstep for Back 4 Blood in my opinion. The games later difficulties were outright punishing without min maxed card decks and weapons. The difficulty spike from the medium/hard difficulties to the hardest was immense. The game was mindlessly easy, then one step up it was all white knuckles on the controller. It’s a shame, because on the surface the progression systems in Back 4 Blood were way more in depth than L4D, which basically had none (other than achievements). But I guess that goes to show that all a game NEEDS to be successful is to be fun to play, which L4D still is to this day.
Impact
I want to start this section by touching on what these games did for gaming in general. This game series, invented a whole new game genre of procedurally generated horde shooter with objectives. Speaking on the impact though, these games turned Valve into a household name for those that didn’t play CS, or weren’t using Steam. I was already a fan because of Half Life but L4D, regardless of how you feel about the handling of Turtle Rock and L4D2, the L4D franchise changed everything for them, and gaming in general. This game, and movies like the 28 series of zombie flicks reignited the zombie craze from the Romero days before its time.
As for the impact on me in particular…I'll never forget when the beta for the original L4D came out. I still remember loading it up on our Xbox 360. I still remember sitting in the floor at Dads playing the opening of the No Mercy campaign. I remember going down the stairs of the opening map “Apartments” and seeing all the infected dormant…then, when someone made too much noise, fired a shot, or an infected roaming the halls sees someone, all hell broke loose. It was the first game I remember playing that felt EXACTLY like a game I always wanted without even realizing it. I couldn’t get over how perfect it felt and couldn’t get enough of it. Dad and I must have played that beta level 100 times before the game even came out, and I’ve played it with every one in my family that games, all my friends, even strangers over the year. The impact of L4D both the gameplay and the IP in general on me and how it’s shaped my interests cannot be overstated. It’s one of the best games of all time.
Future
I want to finish this page of ranting and raving into the void to talk about the “future” of games like L4D, and zombie games overall in the future. I’ve enjoyed some zombie games (Dead Rising, Dying Light, Dead Island, Resident Evil) but NONE of those felt as good to me as the fast paced horde shooter safe room rush style. In my opinion, the closest thing we ever had to a real spiritual successor was the World War Z game. The horde size was cranked up to 11 and obviously since the game was newer had some pretty awesome visuals. There was some class progression with skills and weapons and some awesome set pieces for maps. The biggest issue I had was the content, or lack there of. The game nailed the gameplay/reason to keep playing aspect, but the game didn’t have much to do and wouldn’t have it for quite some time. The audience was basically drip fed levels. The amount of content the game has now is probably what it should’ve had at launch or not long after in my opinion. That criticism aside, WWZ was probably as close as we’ll get to a L4D title in this day and age, especially since Valve basically confirmed after the unexpected drop of The Last Stand in 2020 that the game series wont get anymore content for either the first or second games protagonists. Another honorable mention I would shout out is the Sniper Elite Zombie Army Games. They’re known for having fun easter eggs and the standard Sniper Elite formula gameplay, definitely not the same pace as L4D or WWZ, but still fun and polished. The first 3 were spectacular, the 4th changed it up with skills that were similar to super powers, which trivializes the game and from what I heard, that was the largest complaint of the game. I think since they’ve added harder modes and such, but wanted to shout out the game series because the series with Mr Sark, APL, NFEN and Sham playing them spanned years and is still a series I visit from time to time. All that being said, at first this was sad we knew no more Valve games were coming, but as time went on, the blow has softened a bit, and now I kind of like that the game is a snapshot of what was such an amazing time in gaming and in my life. I am very nostalgic about games on the Source engine like CS, Half Life, and L4D. Rose tinted glasses for sure, but as long as your fragging zombies with friends, who cares what color glasses you're looking through. Until next time folks, stay moving…stay alive.
Shout out to RoboKast’s video about Back 4 Blood, that’s what gave me the idea to talk about the amazing L4D series, the interesting history of studios involved, and how he various trials and tribulations after the main 2 games came. Please check out his video here:
https://youtu.be/j4IBXP_isow?si=d4y8ogMb-zjtxtJn
Also, for some of my research i watched a bit of cool videos from Cookie Blitz, who does some awesome deep dives into the L4D maps that really puts Valve’s masterclass environmental storytelling on full display, his videos are super fun to watch when he no clips out of the map and shows all of the detail in the maps and things you may have missed on your first (or hundredth if you’re me) playthrough. Check out his channel here:
