Following the application of an update on CS 1.6, it was discovered that Valve had somehow leaked the earliest prototype build for Left 4 Dead, which was then named ‘Terror Strike’. It was a basic concept that looked as though it could have simply been a game mode tacked on to Counter-Strike, with a terrorist needing to plant a bomb before ever-respawning zombies hunted them down. It’s easy to see that this was where it started, but the end product in Left 4 Dead is a world away from Terror Strike.
You Alerted The Horde
In a gameplay clip shared on Twitter by ‘Gabe Follower’, we see a CS terrorist armed with a handgun charging around a blank map while being harassed by the most basic of ‘zombie-like’ characters. This was the prototype discovered in the latest CS 1.6 update, and it contained a description of what Terror Strike actually entailed:
Once the bomb is planted, every zombie will respawn and a horde will come for the survivors. The survivors must survive the horde by killing all the zombies. The round is won when all zombies are killed while the bomb is planted.
That’s essentially the core gameplay loop of Left 4 Dead, right? Fight through the zombies to an objective, trigger something, and then survive while whatever you’ve triggered does whatever it’s going to do.
It’s nothing too deep, but it’s an interesting slice of history, and it shows us how one of the greatest zombie shooters of all time found its feet at Valve. Assumedly, Valve will strip this from the game in the near future if it was indeed an accident that it was included in the latest update of CS 1.6, but who knows?
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