15 years on, Left 4 Dead still rules the genre it created

The fifteenth anniversary of Left 4 Dead arrives this weekend, no doubt firing up countless hazy dorm room memories and making a lot of us feel very old. It gave me a pause of disbelief earlier, as I think it’s the first time I’ve properly realised that I’m now old enough to have still been an adult with a job and children 15 years ago. That seems impossible. In my head, my age minus 15 is “around fifteen”, not “mid twenties”.

Left 4 Dead required no onset of time to seem like a revelation. I’d always been into single-player games, and aside from a stint of grade-tanking obsession with Star Trek: Elite Force’s deathmatch modes (basically Quake II with a Star Trek skin, and me being the world’s biggest virgin in high school) multiplayer games had always left me cold. “The best way to ruin a video game”, I’d have probably said, “is to involve other people”.

But by my mid twenties I had actual proper friends, who I liked, and we all had Xbox 360s. Our social group was spread across the UK – some in Glasgow, some near Edinburgh, some in London, visiting each other was expensive, and these were still the days when video conferencing was in its infancy and reduced human conversation to some kind of ordeal resembling trying to get the lid back on a bottle of juice while standing on a vibro plate. Possible, but any other solution is preferable. And we were millennials, so phoning each other was mostly out of the question.