More importantly, it didn't look like a game box.įinally, the team paid a visit to GameStop where they noticed that lots of games use the black and red color scheme in their box art. Box art that's all text doesn't grab the eye, no matter how stylishly it's laid out. Unfortunately, this ran up against the same problems. Seeing that the characters has to be small, the design team decided to make the game's title occupy as much space as possible of the cover box. The individual elements were too small and varied to communicate anything visually interesting. But when viewed from a distance - by someone walking through a game store and spotting it on a shelf, for instance - it just looked like cluttered noise. These attempts did a good job of capturing the multiplayer aspect of L4D, not to mention the intensity of the gameplay experience. Next, the team shrank the heroes even more in order to cram some zombies into the picture.

This solved the problem of portraying one character as the main hero, but it wasted a lot of box real estate without showing any zombies. The design team then tried spacing the four characters out at equal size. Problem is, Left 4 Dead is a multiplayer game with emphasis on team work there is no 'hero'.

Typically, for a video game (or DVD or book) cover to be eye-catching, there'll be a single prominent element front and center- the 'hero' character, for example, with ancillary characters standing around in the background.

The initial Left 4 Dead cover art focused on the game's four heroes, Bill, Louis, Francis and Zoey. On the game's official blog, Valve artist Jeremy Bennett revealed how Left 4 Dead box art came to be.

Left 4 dead game cover