Ready for the zombie apocalypse? Good — in Left 4 Dead, you’re in it. You’ve heard something about a nasty new strain of rabies mutating everyone into flesh-eaters — and you’ve seen them yourself. And lucky you, you’re on foot, skittering from safehouse to safehouse with three other survivors, shooting anything that tries to snack on your brain while praying that your shotgun ammo will hold out until the next checkpoint.

That’s all you need to know — and not coincidentally, it’s also all publisher Valve wants to say. “We’re not really talking much about backstory,” explains Valve’s Chet Faliszek, “because we want to tell it from the view of the survivors — and what would they know? What would you know if something horrible happened? Very little — you’d hear rumors, you wouldn’t be sure. But at the same time, these people do live in a world where they’ve seen zombie movies. All of a sudden, oh my god, these things are real now. Is it cool? No, it’s not cool.”

Coulda fooled us. We got to play two of Left 4 Dead’s four scenarios on PC; each was split into five smaller segments, with breaks for loading in-between. One campaign is currently nicknamed “Hospital” in honor of its location goal: survive life on the streets, reloading between urban buildings, and make it to the roof of the medical center, where a helicopter waits to whisk you to safety. In another campaign — one we also saw running on 360 development hardware, albeit in a very early stage — you’re en route to a rural farmhouse for a rendezvous with a heavily armed flatbed that will get you the truck out of there. Of course, between the time that you radio for help and when it actually arrives, the Infected unleash hell. “We’re trying to deliver the idea of you being in a zombie movie, and having that mayhem,” says Faliszek. “Crazy fast-paced, running with your buddies, and you’re gonna make it out…or maybe not.”


ROLLIN’ UNDEAD 20s
That uncertainty is what makes the game so special. Nothing is scripted in Left 4 Dead — the world is at the mercy of a really, really good programming algorithm. “There’s a ‘Director’ sitting behind the whole game — think of him as a dungeon master,” explains Faliszek. “It’s never the same game twice. You start playing, and he’ll decide, ‘This is too much intensity’ — you’ve had things die right in front of your face, or you’ve gone down. And then it will determine when to spawn the next creatures, so the survivors can get a breather and regroup. Really, the game is about staying together the best you can in moments of chaos. And if you survive those moments, we reward you.” If you don’t survive those moments, you’re not completely out — the Director chooses a locked room as your respawning ground, and the remaining survivors will need to find and rescue you when they pass by.

Each campaign can be completed in under an hour — and if that sounds slight compared to Dead Rising or Resident Evil, consider that L4D is made to be replayed. “People like to say, ‘Oh, it’s only this amount’ — they like to put numbers on stuff,” says Scott Denton, who, like many Valve employees, has many responsibilities but no title. “But when you look at how people really play, those things aren’t quite the same. On [Counter-Strike map] ‘DE_Dust,’ your average match lasts, what, three minutes? It’s not like you say, ‘I beat it in three minutes.’ That’s not how it works.”

The invocation of Counter-Strike is core to understanding what the development teams (plural — see sidebar) are trying to create. “A lot of the stuff that’s in Left 4 Dead, we learned from all the years of building Counter-Strike,” adds Valve’s PR maestro, Doug Lombardi. “[That game] was unapologetic about being somewhat brutal to players — one shot and you’re out. And I think that Left 4 Dead has a similar unapologetic style about it. If you go rogue, your chances of making it are really, really low.”


CHAOS THEORY
That aspect quickly became evident in our games. Waves of zombies rush you and your motley crew — biker Francis, war vet Bill, teenager Zoey, and retail employee Louis — as you try to navigate a nighttime world gone mad. When one member gets injured, another must go back and rescue them before they bleed out. Downed doesn’t mean defenseless, though — you can still dual-wield pistols in a last-ditch effort to splatter some rotters. Our NPC teammates behaved impressively like human players — and if you don’t want to hook up online for co-op matches, you can go through the entire game solo, with computer-controlled survivor allies and Infected enemies provided by the Director.

One thing we weren’t allowed to try during our demo: Gamers will be able to play as four of the five boss Infected, where their sole job is to torment and kill the survivors. Valve promises it’s an entirely different method of play, more akin to running a haunted house than to walking through one.

“If you want to be the griefer character, here you go,” says Dalton with a smile. “It’s already in the game.”

Left 4 Dead’s truly random nature and inherent replayability pose some major challenges to its developers. “How do you tell a story if someone’s going to play the game 200 times?” asks Faliszek. “And how do you do these dynamic conversations with four people if any one of them could be dead at any point? In this game, we never know where you’re going to be, what you’re going to be doing, and if something’s going to be attacking you. Now, we know for a second…but the next second? The whole game’s got to live on that edge, where any minute, these things could happen.

“That’s what’s scary about showing [Left 4 Dead] to the press,” he says with a laugh. “We never have any control! Who knows what the hell’s going to happen next?”