Left 4 Dead playable prototype made by Valve discovered

A little over a year ago we saw the release of Back 4 Blood, the spiritual sequel to Left 4 Dead, but this week another piece of its history was discovered thanks to one of its first playable prototypes. Is about Zombie Citya mod of Counter-Strike that you can now download and try on your own.

The Left 4 Dead prototype called Zombie City was made by Valve as a mod for Counter-Strike, and was posted this week on the Gamebanana portal, where you can download it for free. The map was uploaded to the portal by wolfcl0ckwho also showed how it looks on his Youtube channel.

Through a video of just over 10 minutes, Wolfcl0ck showed the gameplay of the Left 4 Dead prototype last Thursday, January 5, 2023. The player shared the link to download the mod in the description of his video and has already been more than 10,000 views over the course of the week.

So far the mod has been downloaded more than 530 times from the Gamebanana portal and we can already find dozens of videos on YouTube uploaded by other users. Although visually the Zombie City mod does not resemble Left 4 Dead, the basic gameplay is very similar, with AI terrorists attacking using only melee attacks.

“After we released Counter Strike: Source in late 2004 we started experimenting with new game prototypes,” Turtle Rock’s Michael Booth said on a Left 4 Dead commentary track. “We found that a few of us armed to the teeth with automatic weapons against 30 enemy bots using knives was a lot of fun,” he said at the time, recalling the beginnings of Left 4 Dead.