With 2008 behind us, the gaming press has once again sorted through the year's releases and made up their annual lists for Game of the Year. Find out how Left 4 Dead ranks with IGN, GameSpot, GameSpy, 1UP, Onion AV Club, Destructoid, Kotaku, Team XBOX and more by clicking here.

Aesthetics, fiction and gameplay: these are three criteria that we always consider when employing a new art direction for a game. With a game as dark as Left 4 Dead, this meant having to figure out a lot of new ways to use the absence of light to our advantage.

Because Left 4 Dead is a new property for us, we wanted to provide some basic player training prior to the start of the game. Traditional in-game training mechanics didn't make sense for Left 4 Dead, because they would take away from the sense that players had been immediately dropped into a very real, very dire zombie apocalypse.

Join Left 4 Dead’s developers for a few campaigns against the zombie horde this Saturday, November 22 at 9:00 pm (EST). All you have to do is send off a game invite to one of the gamertags listed below. See you there!

Our "Dude, Where's My Thumb?" contest finishes today. We asked hopefuls in the US and UK to submit a picture of themselves in front of a Left 4 Dead billboard for a chance to win prizes. Gabe Newell's looked through all the entries and selected 25 lucky winners

As of midnight EST, the PC version of Left 4 Dead, Valve's zombie thriller, is now available via Steam to gamers around the globe. The title will be available for the PC and Xbox 360 at retail stores on Tuesday, November 18 in North America, and worldwide on Friday, November 21. For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com.

Good news on the Valve Launch Box test run! There was an electrical fire, and all the bees burned to death. The bad news: several employees also perished in the fire and the game will be delayed. Just kidding! About the game. There were some burning deaths. But the game's coming out!

Less than four hours to go until Left 4 Dead goes live at the stroke of midnight (EST) on Steam, and that means the Valve Launch Box will be dragged out of its off-season home in Gabe Newell's tool shed.

We were going to title this post "Infect Your Desktop!" until someone remembered what a bad idea it is to put those words together in conjunction with free downloads. Our back-up title, "Put These Pictures on Your Computer," wasn't nearly as clever, so we'll just quit while we're ahead and let you download the wallpaper.

Left 4 Dead is finally here! Well, almost, anyway. The full game won’t be available for another week (November 18 on Steam and in retail stores across America). But you can get a taste of the blood-splattering, zombie-killing fun right now!