An early prototype of Turtle Rock’s Left 4 Useless has leaked on Steam, and it is fully playable. In response to sport historian Tyler McVicker, the prototype is the primary time that most of the people has seen early footage of the acclaimed zombie shooter.
Turtle Rock co-founder Michael Sales space has acknowledged in Left 4 Useless commentary (as PCGamer acknowledged) that the sport started as a Counter-Strike mod. However it’s not every single day {that a} sport’s prototype will get randomly uploaded, and not to mention in a playable state.
Initially recognized as Zombie Metropolis (or Terror-Strike), the Left 4 Useless prototype was a mod for Counter-Strike: Supply lately uploaded to the mod web site GameBanana over the weekend as half of a bigger mod leak. In it, counter-terrorists are bots who swarm gamers and solely attacked with knives.
The mod’s uploader, Wolfcl0ck, mentioned they made some high quality of life adjustments, however in any other case left the mod untouched. “It nonetheless retains the map’s fundamental setup, primarily making it the way it was imagined to look if not for engine porting points,” they wrote.
Within the aforementioned commentary, Sales space mentioned that whereas creating bots for Counter-Strike: Supply, Turtle Rock (then referred to as Valve South) realized that “a couple of of us armed to the tooth with computerized weaponry towards 30 knife-wielding enemy bots was loads of enjoyable.”
“That fundamental kernel of ‘small crew of pals towards hordes of clawing enemies’… we quickly realized that the ‘co-op vs the horde sport’ had a ton of potential.”
After its fall 2008 launch, Left 4 Useless obtained essential and industrial acclaim, and Valve acquired Turtle Rock that very same yr. The sport’s campaigns had been ultimately ported over to its 2009 sequel, Left 4 Useless 2, and the studio was re-founded as an unbiased studio again in 2011.
Left 4 Useless has since gone on to affect current titles comparable to Evil Useless: The Sport and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Extraction. It is also closely influenced Turtle Rock’s current title, the 2021 zombie shooter Again 4 Blood.
