The Left 4 Dead team considered cutting zombies entirely after talking to Gabe Newell

gamesradar.com:

Valve boss Gabe Newell once encouraged the Left 4 Dead team to reconsider including zombies at all.

That's according to former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who discussed Left 4 Dead's development in a recent Kiwi Talkz video (spotted by NME). Faliszek contributed to multiple Valve games including Half-Life 2: Episodes 1 and 2, both Portal games, and both Left 4 Dead games, and he's since founded his own studio to work on co-op shooter The Anacrusis, which is proudly carrying on the spirit of Left 4 Dead. But to hear Faliszek tell it, Newell wasn't totally sold on the now-iconic enemies of the franchise to begin with. 

"I remember, he's just like, well let's not do zombies, zombies are just cheesy," Faliszek said of a meeting with Newell. "They're just really cheesy. And at the time, you did not have The Walking Dead TV series and all this, right? So it was very cheesy. But as a kid who saw Dawn of the Dead at a midnight movie and was just, like, terrified, it wasn't cheesy to me. I had no idea those scenes were cheesy until watching them later."

Newell argued that the popular zombie properties of the time used the threat of the undead to tell stories about broader and larger themes, and he pushed Faliszek and the rest of the team to define what Left 4 Dead would be about. Faliszek said the game would focus on the camaraderie born from chaos – a motif that would eventually come to define the franchise – but it sounds like Newell wasn't easily satisfied and constantly pushed the development team to stress-test not only what worked, but if it was still working. 

In a tweet, Faliszek added that Gabe would push "on all aspects of the game and [make] sure we thought through the choices and didn't just accept them as the