14 DAY TRIAL // Left 4 Dead 2 has a lot of controversy surrounding it, partly because it will arrive almost a year after the original game, which prompted many players of the first title to boycott it unless Valve released new content for it before L4D 2 would arrive.
But another source of controversy has been a Houston Chronicle blog in which a writer said that Left 4 Dead 2, because it had some of its action placed in New Orleans, was racist and insensitive to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
In a recent interview, the writer of the game, Chet Faliszek, responded to those claims and emphasized that two of the four characters were of African-American descent. Also, the zombies were a mixture of breeds so the racism claims were there just because someone wanted them.
“Utter insanity,” Faliszek stated. “There are mixed races of zombies, there are all different races of zombies that you shoot, and since we placed it in New Orleans, that makes it racist? I honestly re-read the paragraph about five times ... but when two of the characters in your game are African-American, it's a weird thing to be accused of. We're like, 'how does this work'?”
He also revealed that New Orleans was a place close to the heart of Valve so it had been treated with the utmost respect. “As far as Katrina goes, if you go down to New Orleans, Katrina's still going on. I mean, it's messed up, it is crazy that the city is still in the state it's in, and we treat that with the utmost respect. Our CEDA thing is not some subversive commentary on anything. This is a videogame, those are real people's lives, we are not trying to make a statement with that ... It's a place we love, it's dear to our hearts. We would not cheapen it. It's not a brick-for-brick representation of New Orleans; it's a fictional version, and I love that city.”
This whole controversy is extremely similar to the one that appeared when Resident Evil 5 was announced, as Chris Redfield, a Caucasian man, was sent out to Africa where a zombie outbreak occurred. Because in the minds of some people the fact that the zombies were black in Africa was seen as discrimination, the game received a lot of bad press. In the end, considering that the title managed to move over 5 million copies, this didn't really affect it.