In a recent interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Left 4 Dead creator Mike Booth talked about the influx of co-op games in recent years. Despite the increase of co-op games, Booth still said there’s not enough of them.
“It’s hard to make a good co-op game. Because you have to build the game from the beginning assuming that it’s co-op. To design a game assuming that you have to work together to win the game, and not in a punitive way, in a way that players want to do that, and it feels great, is a fundamentally different way of thinking and designing a game around that, and there just aren’t enough yet. There still aren’t enough.”
Mike Booth, Creator of Left 4 Dead.
Mike Booth founded Turtle Rock Studios in 2002. The developer created Left 4 Dead and was purchased by Valve before the game was released. Although that didn’t go so well. After a couple of years, Booth and the other members of Turtle Rock opted to leave Valve. They were allowed to keep the Turtle Rock name, but Valve retained the rights to Left 4 Dead. Valve released a sequel to Left 4 Dead in 2009 but the franchise has largely been dormant since then, despite the popularity of the games.
Since Booth left the studio in 2010, Turtle Rock has been trying to recapture the co-op glory it achieved with Left 4 Dead. The company released Evolve in 2015 which was influenced by Left 4 Dead’s co-op. Unfortunately, that game wasn’t able to find its footing before the servers were shut down in 2018. Last year, Turtle Rock released Back 4 Blood, a game that was described as being Left 4 Dead 3 in all but name. Back 4 Blood took the same co-op formula that made Left 4 Dead popular and added a decade of video-game enhancements.
Check out the full interview with Mike Booth where he discusses his new game Demeo and more at the source.
