radio667
09-06-2011, 04:21 PM
from next-gen.biz .............. Valve’s co-op take on undead horror redefined online play and scared us witless. Not bad for an apocalypse with just 30 zombies.
Chet Faliszek knows more about the living dead than is healthy. In October 2008, a month before the launch of Valve’s zombie-horror game Left 4 Dead, the writer was standing in a supermarket ice-cream aisle when a girl came running over and enlisted his help in settling an argument with her boyfriend. “Hey, mister,” she asked without a flicker of embarrassment. “Can zombies swim or not?” Faliszek, Valve’s resident undead expert, stroked his beard and offered an extensive insight into the aquatic abilities of ambulatory corpses. “She was horrified by the depth and detail of my answer,” he laughs.
Everyone gets zombies: they’re dead or infected, they shamble or charge, and they want to eat your brains. Human nature is rather more slippery. When the L4D team began running external playtests for its horror shooter, it was shocked by what players got up to.
“It was kind of like watching a lab rat experiment,” recalls Mike Booth, then CEO of Turtle Rock Studios, where L4D originated. “Some people would declare themselves the leader and bark instructions, whether they were qualified to or not. Other guys just wanted to help out and make sure everyone had health kits. A few would just wait for the moment to stab you in the back.”
Ask Valve staff about their favourite playtest moments and the stories come thick and fast. There were the LAPD cops who arrived in full-on bravado mode and were instantly turned into zombie chow. Then there was the time when four newbies spawned on the rooftop at the beginning of the No Mercy map and turned into lemmings.
“The first one just jumps off the roof and ledge hangs,” remembers Faliszek. “The other three just inexplicably followed him. Why they would do that, I don’t know. I think they thought the first one knew what they were doing so they followed. We decided to call that an outlying data point and just hoped it never happened again!”
Perhaps the most illuminating anecdote, though, is the one about the kid who brought his dad to play alongside two Counter-Strike pros. As the father failed badly, the kid began ignoring him – but the veterans ushered him through.
“They protected him – they went back for him when he trailed behind,” remembers Faliszek. “In return, he was able to help them up when they were incapacitated. Watching that interaction between strangers and realising that it could happen in the game was one of those moments like: ‘OK, this is going to work. We’ve really got something here’.”
Just like in the best zombie movies, the real drama in L4D lies in the relationships between the living, not the dead. The infected are just a pretext for collapsing the social order and forcing people to depend on one another to survive. 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.
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. 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. It was an incredibly intense experience.
When Booth showed the prototype to Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, the Valve staffers couldn’t stop playing it. Big deadheads, who’d worked on an unrealised online text game called Zombie World in the ’90s, they instantly saw the appeal. “It captured the thing we always loved about the zombies,” says Faliszek. “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.”
Page 2 (http://www.next-gen.biz/features/making-left-4-dead?page=2)
http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k293/Hans-Von/Logos/Left4DeadConceptArt.jpg
Chet Faliszek knows more about the living dead than is healthy. In October 2008, a month before the launch of Valve’s zombie-horror game Left 4 Dead, the writer was standing in a supermarket ice-cream aisle when a girl came running over and enlisted his help in settling an argument with her boyfriend. “Hey, mister,” she asked without a flicker of embarrassment. “Can zombies swim or not?” Faliszek, Valve’s resident undead expert, stroked his beard and offered an extensive insight into the aquatic abilities of ambulatory corpses. “She was horrified by the depth and detail of my answer,” he laughs.
Everyone gets zombies: they’re dead or infected, they shamble or charge, and they want to eat your brains. Human nature is rather more slippery. When the L4D team began running external playtests for its horror shooter, it was shocked by what players got up to.
“It was kind of like watching a lab rat experiment,” recalls Mike Booth, then CEO of Turtle Rock Studios, where L4D originated. “Some people would declare themselves the leader and bark instructions, whether they were qualified to or not. Other guys just wanted to help out and make sure everyone had health kits. A few would just wait for the moment to stab you in the back.”
Ask Valve staff about their favourite playtest moments and the stories come thick and fast. There were the LAPD cops who arrived in full-on bravado mode and were instantly turned into zombie chow. Then there was the time when four newbies spawned on the rooftop at the beginning of the No Mercy map and turned into lemmings.
“The first one just jumps off the roof and ledge hangs,” remembers Faliszek. “The other three just inexplicably followed him. Why they would do that, I don’t know. I think they thought the first one knew what they were doing so they followed. We decided to call that an outlying data point and just hoped it never happened again!”
Perhaps the most illuminating anecdote, though, is the one about the kid who brought his dad to play alongside two Counter-Strike pros. As the father failed badly, the kid began ignoring him – but the veterans ushered him through.
“They protected him – they went back for him when he trailed behind,” remembers Faliszek. “In return, he was able to help them up when they were incapacitated. Watching that interaction between strangers and realising that it could happen in the game was one of those moments like: ‘OK, this is going to work. We’ve really got something here’.”
Just like in the best zombie movies, the real drama in L4D lies in the relationships between the living, not the dead. The infected are just a pretext for collapsing the social order and forcing people to depend on one another to survive. 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.
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. 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. It was an incredibly intense experience.
When Booth showed the prototype to Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, the Valve staffers couldn’t stop playing it. Big deadheads, who’d worked on an unrealised online text game called Zombie World in the ’90s, they instantly saw the appeal. “It captured the thing we always loved about the zombies,” says Faliszek. “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.”
Page 2 (http://www.next-gen.biz/features/making-left-4-dead?page=2)
http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k293/Hans-Von/Logos/Left4DeadConceptArt.jpg