Valve officially announced their latest game, Left 4 Dead in a media extravaganza today. Spokesperson Darveena Franks told the press that this was their most groundbreaking release to date.  "We've done things in L4D that no other developer has the skill or guts to do, its truly a revelation in gaming. Instead of innovation, we like to call it 'Unnovation. First of all, while other games let 8 or 16 or 32 people play together, we have Maximum of 4 players at once. Four. And while some games add lots of artificial intellligence to the enemies to make them more believable, we stripped out all AI of any sort. Instead, we've replaced the eloborate artifical intelligence routines we used in HalfLife 2 with the code for the ghosts from Pacman. Basically, all the enemies just move directly toward the player. That saved us a ton of development time. We at Valve also noticed that a lot of games have been falling back on the crutch of so called 'good graphics'. Well, we don't play 'follow the leader' at Valve, so we used the same graphic engine that we've had for 12 years. Plus, it's always dark, so you can barely see. That way, you can imagine that the game has incredible graphics. Using this strategy, even gamers with a Voodoo1 graphics card get an excellent gaming experience. If its good enough for Counterstrike, its good enough for Left 4 Dead.

We asked how Valve planned to market a game that was lacking in so many features that gamers have come to expect. Ms. Franks responded with 'Oh, we have a can't miss marketing campaign planned. First, we write 'VALVE' in big letters on the box. That alone will guarantee 2 million in sales. Also, we are implementing our patented B1GHL2A strategy. That stands for 'Buy 1, Get HalfLife 2 Again'. Its where we tell people if they buy this game, we'll throw in a copy of HalfLife 2, even though odds are they already own it. We've used this same strategy with great success for games like Team Fortress 2, Countestrike, Halflife Episodes 1 and 2, etc etc.'  

 

 

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