Left 4 Dead

Well, when we play at Valve or they play at Turtle Rock everyone's playing in their separate room, so they might as well be on the Internet - it's just as far away.

Between the voice commands you control, we also have the voice chat - there's new stuff coming out with that that we'll see in The Orange Box. We're working on that, we've upgraded that. The Steam Community brings the chat all the way across, and the whole match-making's going to be redone for this, so it's not just going to be server browser. You're going to be able to go up the Steam Community with your friends, hook up, go play Left 4 Dead, say, "hey, I want to be Survivors, and we'll take on the Infected in the rest of the world". Or we'll be Infected and take on any Survivors around the world, right. There's a lot of that stuff still being worked on. The idea's to make sure that we make it as easy as possible to play with your friends across the Internet.

Well that's why we have QuakeCon right?

And that's been my mantra to the press. We need to get this in people's hands. And people understand that at Valve. Gabe Newell was bugging me that we need to take this to more places. There's some stuff we've talked about for pre-release that we want to make sure...

But also Steam allows us to do a lot of cool things that other companies can't do - it allows us to do free weekends, it allows us to let people try out the full game. And so we're going to do some cool stuff with that. We're talking about it.

Yeah. All that's been talked about and bandied about, and I can't say if we're going to do one thing or the other yet. But definitely Steam allows us to do things on the PC side that no other developer can do, and we definitely don't ignore that. We're going to capitalise on that.

We're trying to bring the same co-op experience over, right. So that's why we've made the Achievement system, right. It should be the same experience on the 360.

That is something we firmly believe in. We firmly believe that when you buy a Valve game, or a Turtle Rock game through Valve, you're buying not the game that comes in the box but you're buying that game and everything that's going to come for the year or few years. We don't let our games go away.

No, because we have the belief that if you keep at it, keep updating it, that will bring the audience to it, right? It's just a weird perception that people have, I think, of...so like the Source Engine we were talking about is a great example. We haven't called it Source Engine 2. But it is a Source Engine 2! We just keep updating it, not worried about saying this is Source Engine 2. Once TF2 comes out, when does it become Team Fortress 2.5, or Team Fortress 3? We just keep going and don't worry about that.

It'll have a retail release and I don't think that's been...It may have been decided but we haven't announced it. [Another one for Doug. We asked: Are you considering extending the EA distribution agreement to cover boxed copies of Left 4 Dead on PC/360? Doug said: "Yes." Isn't Doug great?]

It's just one of those games that I wish we could get everyone to play it, because the minute you play it you're hooked. And I think this proves it, when you have people who essentially spent the last seven hours of their lives here yesterday in line or playing. I just can't wait for it to come out so I can kill them as a zombie.