E3: Left 4 Dead 2

I think with things like that, it's kind of how you're dealing with it. But we chose New Orleans because of how cool of a city it is. We have people at Valve who grew up in New Orleans, we think the culture and the music is really cool, the architecture is beautiful. It makes a great setting for a spooky type of game.

To be honest, the Katrina thing wasn't... I think where you get into trouble is when you're being insensitive, when you're trying to use something like Katrina that happened and was really terrible as a way to present the game. Hopefully it doesn't come off as insensitive.

Well, you know, we've had lots of successful game and taken different tacks in terms of what we were going to go build. We spend a lot of effort on the game design side and the business side, it involves everything we do, trying to figure out the optimal way to deliver content to customers.

It felt like - co-op was a new thing for us, and we learned a lot, the most we've ever done about a type of game, shipping Left 4 Dead 1, and we wanted to build on that. And the team was really efficient at building that kind of product and getting it out.

Yep, we love people making mods and putting their own spin on our technology, so as much as we can do on that, we will.

We don't have a ton of experience internally building products for other console platforms. Left 4 Dead 1 was PC and Xbox, so it made a lot of sense to go for Xbox this time.

It's harder. Absolutely it's harder. In the same way that we put a lot of effort into making internal development efficient, we want as much as efficiency as possible from people building games to the customers experiencing it. On the PC that's much easier of course, on the 360 it's just not.

Yeah, and not just the update process but kind of everything. We know that every PC has a hard drive for example. We can't guarantee that on 360. We can allow ourselves to take iterative game design risks, because we know that if it doesn't work in the wild - the things that are difficult to test internally that require scale - that we can ship that to customers, say in Team Fortress 2, and if it doesn't work out we can change it back pretty easily. Customers kind of enjoy being part of that process. We're not afraid to make mistakes.

We're going to keep building stuff for Left 4 Dead 1. We'll support both. We've always felt that it makes good business sense to keep customers happy. It'll be good for Left 4 Dead 2 to support Left 4 Dead 1. We do have risks in that we don't want to split the two camps, we don't want a Left 4 Dead 1 group and a Left 4 Dead 2 group, that's a problem that we need to figure out.