Left 4 Dead creator and lead designer Mike Booth announced that he’s stepping back into game development and feels that there’s some unfinished business. He’s aiming to make the next big co-op shooter.
Left 4 Dead is a series that has only two games, both of which are close to two decades old at this point. However, these two titles still have an iron grip on the games industry, with their influence being tangible to this day.
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Mike Booth, the main creator and lead designer of the original game, is coming back with a completely different studio backing him to try and make lightning strike the same spot twice.
What’s more, they’re far enough along in development that they’ve started taking playtest applicants.
Left 4 Dead creator is looking for playtesters on a new project
Mike Booth’s career has hopped around a lot since leaving Turtle Rock Studios in 2012. He was with the studio through Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 but left to join Blizzard and work on an unannounced project.
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Turns out this project “wasn’t a good fit” for the company according to Booth himself, and he left to go work with Facebook (now Meta) on VR projects.
These days he works with Bad Robot Games, a subdivision of JJ Abrams’ film and TV production company of the same name. They’ve got a newly formed internal development studio that’s backing Mike Booth’s vision and has been working on this game for a while.
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“I’m Mike Booth (creator of Left 4 Dead), and I’m excited to share that I’m working on a brand new project —a 4-player co-op shooter built on the foundations of what made L4D special,” he explained in a Reddit post.
Left 4 Dead 2The cast of Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 are still iconic to this day.
“If you enjoyed the teamwork, tension, and replayability of my past games, you’ll probably find this one interesting. It expands on the co-op formula in ways I’ve wanted to explore for a long time.”
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And, while it’s not close to release by the sound of it, he has opened up a signup form for playtesters to get some early opinions on the title. You can sign up for that playtest here.
Upon signing up, there’s a small bit of information about the title, the only thing we currently know about this game other than it being a co-op shooter: It’s currently called “Project Tacoma”.
It remains to be seen if Mike Booth can recapture the magic of Left 4 Dead and create a genre-defining title all these years later. However, considering that the core Left 4 Dead series has no sign of getting a new entry from Valve, fans are excited to potentially get a new game.
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