When it came time to photograph the box art of L4D1, our art staff had three goals. One, there should be a hand in it somehow. Two, the hand should have a thumb bitten off, so customers would look at the four fingers remaining on the hand and think, "Hey, four." Three, under no circumstances would we use Photoshop. L4D is a visceral experience, and its box art deserved the same approach. Valve artist and L4D1 hand model Andrea Wicklund was more than happy to help.

We've just announced that Left 4 Dead 2 is coming later this year! It's a much larger game than the original, and features new co-op and versus campaigns, all-new Survivors, boss zombies, weapons, and items, as well as melee combat. Check out the teaser trailer, and watch this space for more news in the coming days.

It's been an interesting week for us here on the Left 4 Dead team. This Monday, for instance, somebody accidentally told Robin Walker he had the power to fire people. In other interesting news, the Left 4 Dead team has all been fired.

The 27th Annual Golden Joystick Awards are now accepting votes for your favorite game of the year. Now, we'd of course never for a second want to sway your vote and suggest you follow this link and vote for Left 4 Dead. We're above that sort of thing.

Today we are opening the beta of the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools to the public. It is available as a free download for all owners of the PC version of Left 4 Dead, and can be found under the "Tools" tab in Steam.

Valve has always seen the value in gathering real-world gameplay data and using it to improve our products. Now we're hoping you'll find it as useful as we do. With the creation of the L4D stats page, our customers will now be able to see a wide variety of gameplay data across all of Left 4 Dead's various game modes.

We just released the DLC on the PC and 360. This includes the new Survival Mode, The Lighthouse Survival map, and 2 new Versus campaigns. To celebrate the release of the DLC we have cooked up a few items for the Valve Store.

Survival Mode pits your team against never ending waves of infected. Sounds simple. Just trap the survivors in a small part of a map, unleash the hordes, and record the longest time. Survival Mode, which will be released next week, is actually a bit more than that.

Hello. My name is Jeremy Bennett, and I'm an artist at Valve. Most gamers only ever get to see the finished product of a game cover, so we thought some of you might find it interesting to hear the process that led to Left 4 Dead's final art. As you'll see, there were quite a few attempts along the way, all of them eventually abandoned.

In a recent update for L4D on the PC, we provided the option for players to choose between starting a game on an Official server or the Best Available. This is just the first step in giving players control over what servers they play on and the type of experience they have.