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Tech

Original 'Left 4 Dead' Developer Releases 'Lost' Level for Free

Unfinished campaign mission differed from core game by encouraging players to split up.
Image: Bolloxed/YouTube

Player cooperation and interaction lies at the heart of the zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, and thus it's understandable why a campaign encouraging players to split up might have been left on the cutting room floor. Now, though—almost eight years to the day after Left 4 Dead's 2008 release—that specific campaign's been released as a free add-on, allowing players to experience what might have been if such ideas had made it into the final product.

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It comes not from Valve proper, but rather from Turtle Rock Studios, which was a Valve subsidiary when it worked on Left 4 Dead in the mid-2000s. As PC Gamer discovered, studio co-founder Chris Ashton posted the add-on on the Turtle Rock forums, along with an annotated map detailing the intended flow of gameplay in a single image. A YouTuber named Bolloxed has already played through much of it and posted the results with a misleading racy thumbnail (which we apologize for). He says it's "actually quite good," though, and you can watch his efforts below.

Keep in mind that this is true cutting-room floor material. It's technically not finished, and parts of it see the grit of the zombie apocalypse fade away into the numbered gray boxes of unfinished game design. It's stuffed with bugs that Ashton himself carefully describes, including explosions that don't cause panic like they're supposed to or zombies who refuse to crawl. But it's playable, at least, and it serves as a link between the Dead Air and Blood Harvest campaigns that was missing in the original release. Ashton says it's also comes with a couple of survival maps that never went public.

His writeup also spells out how to install the addon if you want to try it out. You could simply download the .vpk file, unzip it, and double click on it to launch the campaign; or you could take a more manual route and unzip the file into Left 4 Dead's addons folder.