According to Valve’s Gabe Newell, their hit Zombie first person shooter Left 4 Dead actually started life as a fairy game. Well, sort of. Talking to PC Gamer, Newell explained the rather strange origins of their Zombie shooter and claimed that if it wasn’t for the failure of their “flying fairy game” there probably wouldn’t be a Left 4 Dead series…

“That was a useful failure to us, because it was so clearly dumb that it made us say, ‘OK, what are we actually good at that we can do instead?’ 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. 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.”

Even though the idea of Valve making a flying fairy game sounds ridiculous right now I bet that if they had seen the project through to the end it would have turned out to be the best flying fairy games in the world. (I can only think of one other flying fairy video game off the top of my head; Rare’s Kameo and then it was more of a hovering fairy…)

Left 4 Dead was released on the Xbox 360 back in 2008 and was followed up a year later by Left 4 Dead 2.

Photo courtesy of www.phawker.com

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