Sony has announced that it’s signed on to publish Left 4 Dead designer Mike Booth’s next game, which will seemingly share its core characteristics with Booth’s most famous work.
In an announcement on the official Sony website, the company says that the game will be developed by Bad Robot Games, the video game division of filmmaker J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot.
The game will, according to Sony, be a “four-player, co-operative shooter”, and Booth will be handling direction duties. The companies didn’t announce any further information, other than that the project will be available on PS5 and PC.
Presumably, given the description, Booth’s game will serve as a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead, although it won’t be the only contender in that category.
Indeed, Turtle Rock Studios, the developer behind Left 4 Dead, has made two of its own, namely 2015’s asymmetrical monster-hunting game Evolve and 2021’s very-obviously-Left 4 Dead-inspired Back 4 Blood (neither of which Booth was involved with, having departed Turtle Rock in 2012).
Neither game managed to attract an audience on the same scale as 2009’s Left 4 Dead 2, although Back 4 Blood‘s peak Steam player count of around 65,000 shows that it had a pretty good stab at serving as the chief spiritual successor to the zombie shooter.
Whether or not Booth’s effort manages to match (or potentially even supplant) the popularity of Left 4 Dead 2, which still enjoys a healthy player count, remains to be seen, but since Valve doesn’t seem interested in making a third Left 4 Dead game, it’s all to play for.
We’ll have to wait and see what Booth and Bad Robot Games manage to come up with as regards a Left 4 Dead spiritual successor. Stay tuned for more on this.
