15 years later, Chet Faliszek dishes on the making of Left 4 Dead
The Left 4 Dead co-lead looks back on "paying for the debt" of the game's broken engine—and how that led to a rapidly-developed sequel.
As he recounts his work producing and managing the original Left 4 Dead game launch, released 15 years ago this week, Chet Faliszek pauses our conversation at his Seattle home office to double-check an exact date. "September 7, 2005, at 1:10 p.m." This was the exact moment he was formally introduced (via e-mail) by his boss, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell, to Turtle Rock Studios founder Mike Booth, to “consult” on a new, Valve-funded video game project. Its codename at the time was “Terror.”
Faliszek was a novice staffer at Valve at this point, joining the company earlier in the year, but he had a good hunch about this lead. Speaking in both the past tense and present, Faliszek offers the following about the man at the other end of that e-mail chain: "If Mike Booth said he was releasing a video game tomorrow, I would buy it.”
The development process that followed began on an incredibly small scale, with a much different default playstyle, and the project ran into bumps, snarls, and iconic, frothing-zombie screams before launching as Left 4 Dead a little over three years later. On the eve of the legendary, horror-fueled co-op game’s anniversary, Faliszek sat with Game Developer to talk about its development process–and the learnings he’s taken in making his own Left 4 Dead-like game in the years since.
Left 4 Dead reinvented the world of online games
When it launched in 2008, Left 4 Dead created a monumental shift in the online game space. It was the first truly dedicated co-op shooting game, and in a rarity for the time, it was tuned to be impossible to beat without help and cooperation.
In the years that followed, major series like Halo, Gears of War, and Call of Duty introduced their own "collaborate, shoot, and survive” modes (with CoD outright lifting the zombie conceit), but Left 4 Dead put an indelible mark on the concept that remains popular to this very day. Yet Left 4 Dead started in a much different shape than how it eventually turned out.
The standalone game studio Turtle Rock, headed by Booth, originally supported Valve in an outsourced capacity. After working on an expansion pack for Valve’s tactical shooter series Counter-Strike, Turtle Rock remained on Valve’s payroll to work on the series’ computer-controlled enemies in its offline, single-player modes, along with a focus on a console-compatible, higher-fidelity version of the game dubbed Counter-Strike: Source. But Valve budgeted additional payments to Booth and Turtle Rock for work that Faliszek describes as “this kind of outside person experimenting and pitching other [video game] projects.”
One of those projects was a zombie-themed offshoot of Counter-Strike, code-named "Terror,” which Faliszek says began life as a mod for the newer CS:S engine. In the mod’s earliest tests, a group of human-controlled players faced off against waves of AI-controlled zombies. "Mike was an AI guy, so this was a logical extension,” Faliszek says. (If you’ve kept up with Left 4 Dead history, you might have seen this initial Terror test in the form of a leaked CS:S map and assets.)
Terror’s gameplay evolved during its pre-Valve prototyping phase until Faliszek and Booth were introduced, at which point the game had settled into something a little more CS-like: four players controlling human survivors with an objective (run all of the way through a map, or set off tanks of gas), versus four players controlling constantly respawning, super-powered zombies, with the latter getting help from waves of weaker, AI-controlled undead.
Image via Valve
Everyone in the earliest conversations seemed to agree that out of Turtle Rock’s prototypes of the time, Terror had the most potential as a full game that Turtle Rock and Valve would collaborate on going forward.
Faliszek suggests a substantial period took place between Terror’s limited prototyping phase and Valve’s larger involvement in what would eventually be renamed Left 4 Dead. While working primarily as a writer between 2005 and 2007, Faliszek additionally "playtested anything that came through [Valve’s] doors that I could." He recalls being immediately intrigued by Terror.
"The first time I played Left 4 Dead, I told Gabe, ‘This was the game I’ve always dreamed of,’” Faliszek says. He immediately recognized two touchstones in the game’s early prototypes: “midnight horror, shit-show craziness” films like Dawn of the Dead, and his early experiences with the FPS classic Doom.
Faliszek recalls a mid-‘90s group of friends “playing that as a four-player co-op game by sitting in a warehouse in a super-bad neighborhood in Cleveland, with a case of beer between us, all back-to-back playing Doom all night, to, like, 5am. And then we were scared to go down to our cars, because we'd gotten so amped up.”
With this excitement, Faliszek began casually dropping hints about Terror to Valve colleagues and showing them what state it was in, suggesting they join the project. (Valve famously relies on a "flat” organizational structure even to this day, allowing someone like Faliszek to ask colleagues to wheel their desks toward a new project if it excites them.) Turtle Rock’s internal work on the game ramped up enough to merit a November 2006 announcement by Valve, along with a decision to rename the game Left 4 Dead.
Turns out, one of the original leading names for the game had been “Blood Run,” which Faliszek personally resisted, asking for “one week” for him and his fellow writers at Valve to come up with something different. "Erik (Wolpaw) came up with ‘Left For Dead,’” Faliszek says. “Marc [Laidlaw] added the "4.’”
Yet it wasn't until roughly a year after that announcement that Valve’s own internal focus and staffing on the game seriously expanded. Faliszek recalls the period after The Orange Box shipped, when various employees peeled off to work on the Directed Design Experiments–a multi-month prototype initiative at Valve meant to foster creativity and new ideas.
Image via Valve
"I'm the only person who didn't do the design experiments at first,” Faliszek remembers. “And I didn't do them because I wanted to go work on Left 4 Dead.”
This is when Faliszek began more aggressively enlisting Valve staffers to contribute to the game that Turtle Rock had been leading. He specifically recalls Valve artist Randy Lundeen joining Left 4 Dead after finishing his DDE work–and how Lundeen understood the game’s horror-film vibe instantly. "The first thing Randy did was in the No Mercy [level] apartment building, having it look like these inner-city run-down apartments like in the original Dawn of the Dead,” Faliszek says.
Once he’d attracted a dedicated team, Faliszek and this team relocated to the 11th floor at Valve’s office, away from other colleagues. "We tried to make it our own thing for a little bit, just so we could concentrate,” Faliszek says.
An early model for remote collaboration
This headcount initially grew to roughly 20 Valve staffers and 6 employees at Turtle Rock, with email serving as the primary comms tool between Bellevue, WA (near Seattle), and Lake Forest, CA (in Orange County). Faliszek suggests that limited, focused communication ultimately worked out, even as the Left 4 Dead team grew to Faliszek’s estimate of roughly 100 at Valve’s Bellevue HQ and 10 at Turtle Rock, so long as both teams could regularly engage in an out-loud manner.
Faliszek says in Left 4 Dead’s case, a remote-friendly playtesting environment facilitated regular, organic communication for the split-up offices. Nearly every day, one of the offices (usually Valve’s) would host a playtest, with the resulting gameplay being beamed to a video-link conference environment in both Bellevue and Lake Forest.
Doing this meant that relevant staff members weren’t in the same room as the players, so they could talk more freely about the game’s human-versus-zombie face-offs. More importantly, Faliszek says, regular real-time conversations with gameplay as an anchor "helped the team feel that they were all on the same page. You feel unheard If, after a playtest, you can't voice the problems that you saw, or talk about your ideas and how to make things better.”
Before Left 4 Dead’s team had grown to over 100 staffers, Faliszek recalls the moment when he was inadvertently christened as Left 4 Dead’s project lead on the Valve side.
"Aaron Seeler was the engineer that was helping do the Xbox 360 version, because [Left 4 Dead] was gonna be our first Xbox game originally. Gabe was asking him some questions, and [Aaron] was like, ‘Well, you should just talk to Chet, Chet's kind of the person.’ Like, no one ever told me I'm running it!” Yet from that point, Newell made Faliszek the point person for Left 4 Dead