15 years later, Chet Faliszek dishes on the making of Left 4 Dead

22.11.2023 - 16:01 / gamedeveloper.com / Gabe Newell

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.

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