14 DAY TRIAL // It's been three months since Valve release a sequel to the popular zombie shooter, Left 4 Dead, and the developers have started adding up some numbers to see how the game's been faring. While pretty much any game company does this, announcing the performance of their products soon after they were launched, either for publicity, when the results are good, or simply to keep their investors up-to-date with what's going on with their money, Valve seems to do it more for the fans.
The Valve-way of announcing how the game performed in its two months of life is less sales-orientated and more "damage done"-orientated, as the developer released the numbers of zombies killed in the first two months of Left 4 Dead 2's existence. "In the first two months of Left 4 Dead 2's release, 28,981,249,043 zombies have been shot, bludgeoned, chainsawed and killed – or, for our younger readers, taken to a farm where they can frolic and shuffle around forever," Valve's official statement read.
Numbers are a great way to draw a picture, with a very vertical, scalable concept, but to help put things into perspective, Valve also issued a few explanations to those numbers. However, some aren't all that insightful as they should be. "You read that correctly: 28 BILLION. To put that number in perspective: The entire population of the planet has been zombified and killed 4.26 times. With the average height of a zombie being 6 feet, if you stacked them end to end they would circle the globe 1,322 times. If you placed 28,981,249,043 rulers end to end, they would reach 28,981,249,043 feet in the sky."
The official blog post ended by saying that, "In short: That is a bucketload of dead zombies. Nice job, everyone." And while some might fear that, with 28 billion zombies now all busted up and broken, the game might be running out of them, Valve was eager to assure us that, "Don't worry, we'll make more." If anything, the upcoming DLC, The Passing, is bound to spice things up even more, with plenty more zombies to be fed to our relentless zombie-surviving drive.