Left 4 Dead Was Supposed To Be A “Flying Fairy” RPG!

Valve’s zombie slaying co-op FPS is awesome and is literally one of the best the Xbox 360 has to offer but if Left 4 Dead didn’t turn out the way it eventually did, what if it was originally supposed to be an entirely different sort of game altogether?

Some very interesting details surfaced in a recent interview between PC Gamer and Valve MD Gabe Newell, project manager Erik Johnson and marketing director Doug Lombardi.

When asked about some of the company’s biggest failures that never made it passed early development, the trio began describing a ‘flying fairy’ RPG that utilised hand gesture-based controls. As far removed as this is from the AAA norm at valve, it gets weirder. the game apparently one of “a few failed starts to build Left 4 Dead” and revealed that “It turned into Left 4 Dead.”

This failed fairy RPG that sounds destined to accomplish nothing was the seed from which Left 4 Dead grew.

Newell looked at the game rather optimistically saying that it was a “useful failure” that helped the team focus on what the game had right which when ripped out became the backbone of L4D.

“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. 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.”

A strange birth for Left 4 Dead if ever there was one.

[Source: CVG]