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Title: Left 4 Dead
Released: November 2008
Official Website
Update History
Steam Game Page
Left 4 Dead Walkthrough
Left 4 Dead Achievements

Originally developed by Turtle Rock Studios, (which would later merge with Valve for a time), Left 4 Dead is a cooperative first person shooter that pit human players, called "Survivors" against hordes of zombies, including some "Special Infected", all ruled over by an AI Director. This invisible force takes everything that the survivors do into account, such as how much health has been lost, how many bullets have been wasted, as well as medkits used, and other factors, to spawn zombies dynamically, ensuring that no two games are exactly alike.

In addition to the Single Player campaign mode, which pits a human player and 3 AI controlled players against the horde of zombies, there is an online cooperative mode, in which other humans can take control of the remaining Survivors, working together to travel between checkpoints and safe houses. The Xbox 360 version of the game includes two player split-screen, for this Campaign mode, while the PC version does not, though the community has released modifications to allow it.

The third game mode is Versus. Versus plays similarly to Campaign, except that you now have two teams of players, and they switch off between playing as the Survivors, and playing as the Special Infected. The Special Infected include things like the Boomer, who vomits bile that attracts hordes of zombies, the Hunter, who can tackle human survivors and pin them to the ground, the Smoker, who has a tongue that can drag them away from the others, and even a Tank, who can both deal and take a lot of damage. Each team is scored as Survivors, based on how far they got, how many players died, and how much damage they took.

Finally, the last game mode is Survival, which consists of the four survivors holding up and trying to fend off waves of zombies for a long period of time. With the implementation of leaderboards, Survival allows the more competitive players to keep improving their survival time over that of their friend's.

Left 4 Dead received a variety of awards, being hailed as the Best Multiplayer Game of 2008 by IGN, Gamespy, Spike TV, NoFrag, and BAFTA. It was also awarded as the Computer Game of the year by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, Spike TV, and Bit-tech. A sequel, Left 4 Dead 2, was released in 2009.