It was Left 4 Dead 2's birthday two days ago, marking 14 years since the release of our 70th top PC game of all time. It's all a distant memory now, but that game's announcement originally drew a fair bit of heat from fans, even sparking one of our hobby's many doomed fan boycott movements. Releasing almost exactly a year after L4D1, some fans felt that Valve had betrayed them. Where was the long tail of development for the first game? Why was the studio moving on to something entirely new instead of integrating L4D2's content into the first game?
Well, it turns out there's an answer to that, and it's because L4D1 was so spectacularly broken no one at Valve dared touch it. So says Chet Faliszek, former Left 4 Dead lead and current lead on The Anacrusis, in a recent chat with Game Developer.
