When you get to the end of a hard-fought round in Left 4 Dead 2, you’re usually crawling towards a rugged red door. Maybe there’s only two of your zombie-slaying quartet left… your health bars stripped away by the horde, your eyesight drained of colour, signalling that one more knockdown equals permadeath. If you’re lucky, you push through the pain and make it into the safe room on borrowed time, grab some ammo and shoot the charging zombies to carve a safe route for the rest of your team.
That’s unless you’re playing Funny Doors. Funny Doors dictates that if you get into the safe room before a fellow survivor, in spite of earning those precious 25 points for letting them live to see the next round, you must hammer the E button to open and close the safe room door as they approach, turning the final moments of each round into one hilarious test of strength.
Left 4 Dead 2’s safe room doors have a serious heft to them, and as such, each swing animation creates a tiny window of opportunity for the survivor to get past your self-flagellating trap as they howl at you on comms. Usually, they’ll get pummeled by a charger and you’ll have to head out and save them. It’s an evil habit. Barbaric, you could say, but it’s one of many peculiar bits of communal context that have ensured this game has become a weekly inevitability where many modern titles have failed to hold our attention.
As of 17th November, Valve’s atomic zombie smasher is 10 years old. Left 4 Dead 2 can get its ears pierced or be convicted of a crime, yet if you choose to boot it up for a night of nostalgia, you’ll be surprised. As you’re seeking out that elusive perfect score and being added to rage quit Steam groups, you’ll notice it feels as spry as it was in 2009. Somehow it still hasn’t fallen out of the top 100 games played on the platform, averaging around 10,000 players a day.
Tom Leonard was part of the Ravenholm cabal during Half-Life 2’s development and later led Valve’s experimental R&D project, the Directed Design Experiments. Valve’s pipeline shut down for a few months and the developers split off into small groups to work on creatively invigorating projects. He tells me the “non-crunchy” way in which those experiments were handled influenced the way Valve approached the sequel to Left 4 Dead.
“There’s almost like a deafening silence after you push to get a game out the door. But you don’t want to move straight into a crunch,” Leonard says.
“Left 4 Dead 1 was a pretty crazy project in terms of getting it pulled together. It was arguable that none of us understood in a formal sense how the game works, it was just like… ‘Hey, it works!’ ”