Gabe Newell Didn't Want Zombies in Left 4 Dead

Valve president and co-founder Gabe Newell was initially not keen on featuring zombies in the hit game Left 4 Dead, saying he felt the concept was just too cheesy.

According to a report by VG247, YouTuber Kiwi Talkz recently spoke to ex-Valve writer Chet Faliszek about his work on Portal, The Anacrusis, and more.

Host Reece Reilly also asked Faliszek about his work on Left 4 Dead, during which the latter revealed that Newell initially expressed doubt about having zombies in the game.

"At the time, once I went to dinner with Gabe and he was like 'if you look at zombie movies, Night Of The Living Dead is about racism, Dawn Of The Dead is about consumerism'" said Faliszek. As part of the conversation in trying to understand the core concept of what Left 4 Dead might be, Newell asked "what is your game about?"

"And I'm like well it's about working together, it's the game itself, it's a reflection of the game," Faliszek continued. "We'd kind of get pushed more and more because I remember (Newell) said 'well let's not do zombies, zombies are just cheesy.' At the time you did not have The Walking Dead TV series and all of this, so it was very cheesy," said Faliszek.

Eventually, Valve, Faliszek and Newell decided to make some of the game's characters aware of zombie movies and comics, so that they would be conscious of the ridiculous situation they found themselves in.

"So I was just like why don’t we just take the characters and the world, and make some of the characters in the world aware that they’re in a zombie movie essentially. Zoe and Lewis understand that like 'oh my god this is the thing from movies,' but they play it seriously," Faliszek added.

Considering how the co-op horror shooter eventually became one of the most popular games of all time, things would probably have panned out differently had Faliszek listened to Newell's advice on this particular occasion.