Left 4 Dead Began as a Fairy Focused Project

A trio of Valve top executives have revealed the creation process that lead to the development and the launch of their very successful Left 4 Dead, showing how failure and fairies collaborated in order to deliver the adrenaline filled zombie killing experience.

Gabe Newell, the co founder of Valve, together with Erik Johnson, the project manager for Portal 2, and Doug Lombardi, the director of marketing at the company, sat down for an interview with PC Gamer and Left 4 Dead was cited as one of most interesting examples of how the company works when putting together new projects.

The startling admission is that the zombie post apocalyptic cooperative shooter was initially a game built around fairies.

Gabe Newell went on to describe the process, saying “It was so bad you wanted to ask yourself: ‘How could we make a game that was this bad? And how should we make a game?’ And we said we should focus on what we do really well, so why are we doing this game which was kind of a… it wasn’t really an RPG… it was this action fantasy sort of role playing game that had no story. “

He added, “And then we said ‘OK, that’s so horribly wrong. What we should focus in on is AI and playing in co-op, and that’s the interesting opportunity.’ That was where Left 4 Dead came from.”

At the moment the big project Valve is working on is Portal 2, the game that is set to be launched on February 9, 2011.

The game will be significantly bigger than its predecessor, which was launched in 2007 as part of the acclaimed The Orange Box, introducing specific cooperative gampelay sections and creating a more complex story that takes place quite a number of years after the story of GLaDOS, but features the same main character, Chell.