The klaxons sounded earlier today when HTC China president Alvin Wang Graylin shared a few slides from his recent talk on the future of VR, including one that said, "Valve HL Alyx/LFD3 will drive consumer and AAA studio interest." The acronym isn't quite right, but the reference to Left 4 Dead 3 was obvious.

There was an initial jolt of excitement—surely a highly-placed executive at HTC would have an inside track on this kind of thing, right?—but it was all very thin and out-of-nowhere, and people quickly began to theorize that Graylin's source was actually the highly-speculative Valve News Network site, a theory bolstered by this tweet from December 2019.

It seemed weird to me that an HTC president would go out on a limb like that based solely on a VNN report, but some of his other bullet points were pretty pie-in-the-sky too: "AR/VR connected 24/7 to AI Cloud will make humans super intelligent," for instance, or "Elderly will use VR to re-enter work force and travel the world." 

However accurate or inaccurate those predictions prove to be, we can say for sure that the one about Left 4 Dead 3 is way off the mark.

"We’ve seen rumors to this effect for the last couple of months. We did briefly explore some Left 4 Dead next opportunities a few years ago. But we are absolutely not working on anything L4D related now, and haven’t for years," Valve said in a statement sent to IGN. 

"It’s clear some people are having fun creating misinformation to spin up the community and other outlets. Unfortunately, for now a new L4D game is not something we’re working on."

Sorry, everyone. But if leaks and rumors are your thing, we've got a roundup of all the Left 4 Dead 3 scuttlebutt we've run across over the years that you can dive into right here.

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.

Each of the special infected in Left 4 Dead has its own musical tell. The hunter's is a tripping plink-plonk-plink, the spitter's got an eerie four notes versus the smoker's simple two, while the tank rolls up with its own miniature symphony. Play for long enough and you'll learn them all, but it's probably the witch you memorize first. Her musical sting is high-pitched and insistent, the first melody quickly joined by a second to create a sense of escalation. Even before you hear her sobbing, that tune plays and you know it's time to turn off the flashlight and step carefully.

Not startling her should be easy, but then the director plants her somewhere unavoidable, or your friend turns a corner a little too fast, or a stray bullet or pipe bomb catches her and that's it. She goes from sobbing to screaming and beelines for the survivor who startled her, fingerknives out as she knocks them down. She's not the kind of threat who'll take out a whole party, and eventually you learn to deal with her, but the terror of that shrieking attack is hard to get used to.

When you stumble across zombies in Left 4 Dead they're often just doing their own thing, leaning against walls looking sad. Until you bumble up waving your guns and one-liners around they just want to be left alone with their misery. The witch is the most miserable of the miserable, a goth queen whose sobbing is a warning to just let her be. Left 4 Dead calls them Infected rather than zombies which rehumanizes them a little, and the witch is the most human of all, the one who seems most aware of the tragedy of her situation.

The other special infected are designed to split the party. They lure or drag you away, they separate you with lakes of acid, they throw you around. The witch has a uniting effect, forcing everyone to huddle together on the far side of a room trying to pass without incident in total silence.

Left 4 Dead is a chatty game, one where the characters are jokey and everyone has to communicate when they need healing or are low on ammo. The fact the witch can make everyone shush and get serious, whispering into their mics when she's around as if she can hear them over the internet, is honestly a miracle.

If you think the tank is scarier just because it has more hit points I don't even know what to say to you, man.

It's been longer than you think since Left 4 Dead 2 came out, and if you don't believe me, chew on this: Ten years have passed since Coach, Nick, Rochelle, and Ellis first blazed their way across the Infected wasteland. That's right, a full-on decade—you didn't see that coming, did you? I can barely believe it myself.

Sadly, despite all that time gone by there's still no sign out of Valve that Left 4 Dead 3 is something that will ever actually happen. But it seems like something is happening—in that other first-person zombie game, Dying Light.

Techland actually hinted at this a couple of days ago in a tweet following the end of the Dying Light: Deadeye's Promise event, saying, "We don't want you to be left 4 dead waiting for results!" That got some attention, but a lot of respondents seemed to think it was just a throwaway gag or pre-Halloween reference. Apparently not.

For now, Techland hasn't said anything more about it, and so it falls to us to speculate. It could be (and, I will commit further, probably is) something as simple as Left 4 Dead 2 character skins or cosmetics coming to Dying Light, which the studio continues to actively support despite the fact that it's nearly five years old. But Dying Light 2 is expected to arrive in spring 2020, and so with a little stretching and squinting it's possible to see hope for something more in-depth, especially with Left 4 Dead 2's big 10th anniversary coming in November. (Ten years! Where does the time go?)

I've reached out to Techland and Valve for more information. We'll let you know what happens.

Demo's Spooktacular Halloween Prop Pack is tearing up the charts in the Left 4 Dead 2 Steam community—by which I mean about 1,500 people have downloaded it since it was uploaded on October 9. Honestly, that's pretty great for a game that's 9 years, 10 months and 24 days old. In this very moment I've just come to grips with Left 4 Dead 2 being released a decade ago, and I feel like I'm about as old and dried up as The Crypt Keeper (who would make a very good Left 4 Dead enemy). Ten years! And people are still making Left 4 Dead 2 mods. That rules, and this mod looks pretty great.

In a rather eloquent mod summary, Demo remarks that the changing of the leaves marks the beginning of "the spooky season." But is Left 4 Dead 2 really spooky enough? It's got zombies, sure, but what about skeletons? Pumpkins? Ghosts made from bedsheets? Bales of hay, which probably have bugs in them? It's woefully short on these essentials—stuff you'd expect to see in a seasonal event.

"Fret not eager horror-connoisseurs, I've got just the thing you're looking for to fully spookify your Left 4 Dead experience this October!" writes Demo. "Subscribing to this mod will sate your hunger for the true potential of thematic, decorated, festive environments to fight monsters alongside your friends in. No longer will you simply wade through the simplicity of mundane urban environments, now you can enjoy traversing through a world that was ready for Halloween (but not the Green Flu)! This pack replaces/modifies over 100 props and works especially well with No Mercy, Crash Course, Death Toll, Dark Center and The Dark Parish."

As with most things on the Steam workshop, this mod is easy to install. Simply subscribe, and it'll replace a bunch of objects, from tables and chairs to dumpsters and plants, into spookier versions like cauldrons and coffins. To get more into the spirit, pair it with the Colorful Autumn Leaves mod and Spooky Halloween Trash Bags to start. But if you really want to get all kinds of Halloween-y, there's a handy collection on Steam that includes tons more mods.

Grab it here: Trick 4 Treat: A Spooky Halloween Overhaul. The medkit becomes a pumpkin pie. The tank throws a giant pumpkin instead of a rock. Ammo boxes turn into candy boxes. The spitter has a spider coming out of its mouth. There's a lotta spooky goin' on here.

Once all your Halloween mods are in place, just pretend the zombies are actually sugar-high neighborhood kids desperate for more candy. Billy just had one too many mini Snickers and lost control, a little bit. He's not a bad boy. Alternatively, use one of the mods that turn them into skeletons.

It's heartwarming that a mod this fun could come out of nowhere 10 years into Left 4 Dead 2's life, but looking through the game's mod workshop, it's nuts how many mods are still coming out every day. There are a lot of reskins and strange music mods. I don't know who played Detroit: Become Human, or watched Ultraman or My Little Pony and thought "I need to put this into Left 4 Dead," but all of those things have happened, and just in the last three days. How about replacing Coach with the BK Sneak King? Or turning the Tank into a really disturbing Hulk?

Hundreds of Left 4 Dead 2 mods are still being posted on a weekly basis. If you go back in for spooky season, make sure to give the workshop a look first.

Update: Sorry, folks, but mere minutes after our story went live, Valve confirmed that the teaser is in fact a fake. It's still pretty cool though. You can read my our initial thoughts on the presumed-fakeness of the video in the original story below:

Original story: A very impressive teaser that turned up today on YouTube has a lot of people wondering if a new Left 4 Dead game has suddenly sprung a big leak, or if Valve is perhaps trying its hand at viral marketing. It could be—Valve did recently tease a new "flagship" game coming this year, after all, and this wouldn't be the first time we've heard whispers of Left 4 Dead 3—but the far greater likelihood, sorry to say, is that it's a fake. 

For one thing, the video is complete and polished but purely environmental, which isn't at all how Valve rolls: Left 4 Dead is frantic and visceral (check out this L4D2 teaser for evidence of that), and this, for all the atmosphere it stokes, is not. The zombie hand at the end is suspicious as well, because it's a direct copy of the original L4D hand rather than something indicating the third game in the series. Joke about Valve's inability to get to "three" if you will, but I can't see it breaking an established pattern on a major game franchise just to nod-and-wink at a silly inside joke. 

I think the presence of real-world products in the game, like Pepsi and Life, also points toward fakeness. You can't just throw stuff like that into your game or your promo materials without some sort of licensing deal, and there's no evidence of that—and I don't see Valve doing that sort of thing in one of its game worlds anyway.

So it's possible that this could be a surprise L4D3 leak, but only very, very (I mean, very) slightly possible. We've reached out to Valve to ask, just in case, but I'm confident enough to call it now: Very nicely done, yes, but also very fake. 

While the speedruns performed live on stream at Games Done Quick events aren't necessarily the fastest runs in their categories (though world records have been broken), they're often some of the most entertaining. The live audience ups the pressure, and the commentary from the streamers as they explain their ridiculous glitches is always fascinating.

Last week, the latest Awesome Games Done Quick marathon raised over two million dollars for The Prevent Cancer Foundation and gave us many more frame-perfect feats to be awed by. Below are some of our favorite runs from AGDQ 2018 (specifically of games that are on PC, naturally), and we'll have more about the event and its future soon.

Note that you may have to skip ahead a ways in these videos if they don't auto-jump to the beginning of the run. You can see all the runs on AGDQ's YouTube channel.

Resident Evil 7 (1:49:27) 

By Carcinogen

Probably the most widely celebrated speedrun of AGDQ, it's no surprise that we'd want to highlight this incredible Resident Evil 7 run first. It's a perfect entry point into what makes AGDQ special: a talented runner, an informative and funny couch of commentators, and a challenging game that's tense to watch. Carcinogen's run is full of moments where things go wrong and he manages to just barely survive, but it's his charisma that really makes it all fun—like when he takes the piss out of a jumpscare by adding in a scare of his own. —Steven Messner

Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap (27:49) 

By tinahacks

Lizardcube's gorgeous remake of Wonder Boy 3 is mostly faithful to the original, and has a retro mode you can activate at any time to see the original graphics. During tinahacks' skilful run she uses that to skip boss intros, and one of the Lizardcube team, who is there on the couch, is just a little bit crushed by it. Having someone who worked on the game there to contribute insights adds a lot to what would already be an impressive speedrun (I played a lot of Wonder Boy 3 on my neighbor's Sega Master System, and I never came close to being as good as tinahacks). Lizardcube are actively involved with the speedrun community, and even decided to leave a few of the more interesting glitches in their remake so runners could exploit them, as you'll see here. —Jody Macgregor

Skyrim (50:26) 

By Wall of Spain

I enjoyed seeing high-skill speedruns like Claris's run of Sonic Mania, but I also like the goofy stuff and Wall of Spain's glitchy tumble from one end of Skyrim to the other was as goofy as they get. He stops to get married (or at least tries to), screws up one of the only fights necessary to finish the main storyline, and makes extreme use of the strange fact that in Skyrim your character's velocity remains constant when you load a different save. You can complain about Bethesda's open-world games being buggy, but without those bugs glorious messes like this wouldn't be possible and speedruns wouldn't be half as fun to watch. —Jody Macgregor

Half-Life: Opposing Force (26:14) 

By alexh0we

It starts slow, but stick with this run to the second chapter where alexh0we starts murdering hapless NPCs to steal their guns, strafe and machinegun boosting, and sticking some brutal jumps. Most interesting from a technical perspective are the framerate tricks—drop it low enough, for instance, and you can walk through lasers because in no frame will they connect with you. Alexh0we's stream of informative commentary keeps this run entertaining even during the slow parts.  —Tyler Wilde

Arabian Nights (47:17) 

By Kotti

The Awful Games block of ADGQ is a gauntlet of nightmarishly terrible games, but none are as baffling or as hilarious as Arabian Nights, an extremely obscure 2001 platformer that tried to cash in on Prince of Persia’s popularity. From start to finish, the run is a confusing mess of inexplicable glitches and terrible game design underscored by Arabian Night’s eye-rolling portrayal of Middle-Eastern culture and Conan the Barbarian-style objectification of women. You have to see it to believe it. Speedrunner Kotti has to endure multiple crashes just to beat the damn thing, but it’s all worth it for the couch commentary and laughably bad cutscenes. —Steven Messner

Left 4 Dead 2 (55:15) 

By mr.deagle, The Master, burhác, and MrFailzzz 

This is a special run in a few ways. Firstly, it's co-op, which you don't see in a lot of speedruns, and secondly, Left 4 Dead 2 isn't going to throw out weapons and zombies in the same way each time, which sets it apart from games that can be perfectly memorized. Yet the zombies are mere pests to these players, who are wholly focused on performing impressively huge skips (which involve a grenade launcher) and bunny hops. Though I could never play as well as this squad does in Left 4 Dead 2, runs like this can reveal how much challenge comes from us buying into a game's premise rather than the game itself. Play Left 4 Dead 2 like a race to master, and the undead are just speedbumps. —Tyler Wilde

Hollow Knight (38:28)

By Mickely3

It's slightly sad to see one of our favorite games of 2017 demolished in under 40 minutes, but Mickely3's run contains some impressive glitching—did you know you can just float around all the time and Hollow Knight is totally fine with that?—as well as just some old fashioned good platforming.  —Tyler Wilde

The internet is vast and full of streams. The prevalence of YouTube and Twitch ensure that more gaming silliness is being captured and shared than ever. People are still doing amazing work with Source's film making tools and The International 7 produced its share of amusing moments. Here are some of the videos and gifs that tickled us this week.

Rule breaker

An0nymoose, the creator of demented videos like We Like To Party continues to do fine work.

Better luck next time

Via nicky-and-skittles on r/gaming.

That crowd reaction

Valve announced a new game at The International 7 to... let's say a mixed response.

Also at The International

One of Dota 2's most loved players takes on an AI at The International 7. The contender walkouts at 1:36 are perfect. Head to 7:32 to watch the actual contest.

Meanwhile, in War Thunder

Graceful tank action via genericc.

Monster hunter pro skater

Our favourite Witcher 3 mod of the week.

How to stick a landing

Here's how big a deal Doom's shotgun was: in a game with another weapon called the Big Fucking Gun, the shotgun is the one we remember best. It's reliable at practically any distance. One clean shot to the chest will eviscerate most enemies. Somehow that pump action reload animation and its cha-chick are satisfying every single time with only five frames of animation. How many other games are confident enough to give you a gun this good 10 seconds into the first level?

Before Doom, shotguns were for shooting clay pigeons. After Doom, they were for annihilating demons. And for annihilating practically anything else: as Doom birthed a new genre, you could rely on the trusty shotgun to be there almost anytime, more steadfast and reliable than a squirrely pistol or a ammo-hungry rifle. It's our pellet pal. Our blunderbuss buddy. In the wry words of John Romero, when we spent half an hour reflecting on the design and history of Doom's shotgun: "No other game has a BFG 9000 in it, but lots of games have shotguns."

Today we're celebrating that lineage by talking about some of our favorite shotguns and why we love them. Step one: make it kick, and make 'em bleed.

How to make a great shotgun

"Number one, the damage it does is the most important part," said John Romero. He was talking about weapon design in general. There's so much that goes into a good game gun, but those pain points have the biggest impact in making a weapon feel powerful. "If it does more damage than any other gun, it doesn't matter if it has no sound effects, you're going to be using it," he laughed.

OK, but all that other stuff is important too. Animation, sound effects, the works. When they all come together, you can just feel it. It's an almost animal hell yeah. Fullbright's Steve Gaynor practically got poetic describing this sensation:

"Shooter games can be about a lot of things—the complexity of tactics as you use the environment to your advantage, the cat & mouse drama of chasing and being chased, sneaking up on your prey or falling into your enemy's trap—but it's also always about that aesthetic moment where the trigger's pulled and the audiovisual effects deliver that moment of utterly blowing a videogame creature away. And that's what the shotgun's all about. It's loud. It's sudden. And above all, it's effective."

So how do design all that stuff to feel just right? Bill Munk, animator and creative director at Tripwire, had this to say about developing Killing Floor 2: 

"We start with the gore system, which is a very important ingredient that makes shotguns feel devastating. Second is the impulse force applied to the creatures when they get hit, this is really important to not only make the shotgun feel powerful but also adds to the enjoyment of taking down a target. Third is the damage each pellet does, it's a hard balancing act because depending on what you shot, if it doesn't die or react the way you picture it, everything falls apart and the weapon feels unsatisfying. To balance shotguns in KF2 we first start with the price for the ammo, the weight of the gun and the time it takes to reload. Shotguns generally have massive damage but become less effective at range due to the spread of the pellets which also is a nice tool to balance these high damage weapons.

"Last but not least are the shoot animations. This is an area we've put a lot of time and research in. We animate the shots at high framerate so that we can animate the violent force when you fire a shotgun. This is a detail you barely notice in realtime but can feel the difference."

And when Killing Floor 2 slows down into Zed time, you can really see that animation at work.

You can see even more detail in KF2's shotguns firing and reloading here. They're ahead of the curve in animations, but the fact that Doom's shotgun still feels good with only five frames of reload animation shows how much the damage, muzzle flare, sound effects, and other elements of a shotgun can make it feel satisfying without much real detail.

Take Resident Evil 4's starting shotgun, a standard pump action. It's much simpler than Killing Floor 2's weapons, but blasting zombies with it feels a bit like smiting them with the fist of God. Part of that comes from RE4's once-novel over-the-shoulder weapon aiming. It's incredibly physical. You hold a button down to aim and Leon plants his feet. The camera zooms up to his shoulder, and it feels like you're aiming the shotgun with the whole of his body. The muzzle jerks sharply upward when you fire, and a single blast can send a whole crowd flying backwards. Leon pumps out the spent shell before recentering his aim. It's not fancy, but it feels sublime.

Sound off

No game gun sounds more pleasing to the ear than a shotgun except for, maybe, a bolt-action rifle. And those two weapons have something in common: both are about a single moment of release, followed by a peerless sound saying fire again, baby.

Most game weapons are about a constant stream of sound. The blam, blam, blam of a pistol, the ratatatat of an SMG, the heavy thugthugthugthug of an LMG. With a shotgun, it's all about that one shot. It's a crack of thunder, not a boom. "You need a good, sharp, aggressive sound to drive the shotgun's presence home, not some underplayed thud but a good, bracing crack," said Gaynor.

But the reload can be even better. Only a heavy bolt can match the click of a double barrel popping open and closed or the cha-chick of the pump action. That sound effect really hasn't changed much since Doom 1, and it's easy to see why.

Sound is a big part of why we love shotguns, but it's also crucial to the "feel" of hower powerful they are. "I'd say sound is 70% of the feel of a great shotgun mostly because I've played games while they are muted and they lost the feel," said Kynan Pearson, who's worked on the Halo and Metroid Prime series. "The reload noise, the boom and the pain noises create a fantastic symphony of death."

Producer Matt Powers, who worked as a producer on the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series, wrote about this on Gamasutra:

"I kept getting feedback that our shotgun was underpowered…people really kind of hated the shotgun. When I looked at the balance numbers, the shotgun was actually a little overpowered if anything. So…after much consternation I decided to attack the balance issue from the side of perception rather than through the actual numbers themselves. I went to our audio director to talk about changing the sound. He added a bit more low end to the fire sound, pulled out some midrange and bumped up the high end to give it a sharper punch. I did not tell the team that the only thing I changed was the sound, I just asked them to give it another try to see if the changes I made addressed the balance issues they were seeing. The feedback came back unanimously positive."

Animation, sound, weight. Those are some of the ingredients of a great shotgun. So how did id make the first FPS shotgun, with no history to draw on, back in 1993? 

History lesson: the original boomstick

Our love affair with the shotgun started with Doom, but for Romero, it started with two other sources: Rednecks, and Evil Dead. In one of id's earliest games, a 2D sidescroller called Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, you blast ghouls with a shotgun (and can even shoot at diagonals!). In Dave's first game, you had a pistol, but changing that to a shotgun in the sequel was an obvious move. "You're a redneck in Louisiana, of course you'd have a shotgun," Romero laughed. "We mentioned it when we were talking about Doom, we're like 'Hell yeah man, we had a shotgun in Dave and it was awesome. Why not?'"

Doom's shotgun wasn't originally in the plans for the game at all. The small team at id had the pistol, and plans for a rocket launcher, but they needed something in between. So they designed a rifle with a bayonet. The only problem: it wasn't cool enough. "We didn't like the fact that when you jabbed, it just didn't look good. It looked lame," Romero said. "We'd already had lameness issues with Catacomb 3D earlier, when you're using your hand to throw fireballs and stuff. That didn't look or feel cool. With Doom, we did have the bayonet in there, and I believe we even had it working, and it was just like, you know what? No amount of frames will make this look good."

As they started brainstorming sci-fi weapons like the BFG, their thoughts turned to Evil Dead 2. And voila: a shotgun and a chainsaw appeared. "We basically went, 'a shotgun would totally blow away that stupid rifle.' We made the shotgun, we made the chainsaw. It totally felt right in the game. We put it in, and it was just perfect. The gun cocking animation, the sound, it was perfect. The shotgun blast was great and did a good amount of damage. So that's what happened."

The Doom faithful may know that the shotgun was a Tootsietoy Dakota cap gun model bought at Toys R Us and scanned into the game using a video camera, then edited and animated in a Carmack piece of software called Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop. It was named after a Play Doh toy. What's surprising about Romero's story is how little tuning it took to get Doom's shotgun just right. They added a spread and randomness to the firing, but treated the shotgun pellets as if they were bullets, making the gun easy to implement. And because they "wanted every gun to be effective at super far distances," handicapping the shotgun's range wasn't an issue.

"It was important that whenever we added any gun to the game, it never nullified a previous weapon. There had to be a reason for keeping the pistol around and everything else," Romero said. "The shotgun, I believe used the pistol randomness, and also added some to the spread, but not too much. So you could kill stuff at a distance. It was not like a sawed-off shotgun that would have a massive spread."

That would come later, of course, with Doom 2's double barrel super shotgun. First person shooters have since skewed towards treating shotguns more like the sawed off: close combat killers with a very particular purpose, a more compartmentalized approach to "balance" that gives every weapon its role.

"I feel shotguns live and die by where they sit in the balance," said Pearson. "It's easy to make a shotgun too effective or nerf it so it's not dominant in the weapon selection. I feel like shotguns need drawbacks, but part of the satisfaction is the exaggerated quality of wrecking opponents at close range. I prefer tight spread with damage dampening at distance. Everyone has different preferences so it depends on the game."

We can still delight in a good kill with a well-balanced modern military tactical 12-gauge, but our favorite shotguns are the ones that defy those restrictions. Look at the shotgun in Halo: Combat Evolved, which was overshadowed by the pistol but still had tremendous range and a vast ammo reserve.

Other shotguns do something unique to stand out, either in how they affect enemies and the world, or in how they let lead fly. 

Blaster master

When I get a headshot with a pistol I expect, at best, a backflip or an exploding skull. But much of the joy of a shotgun comes from its physicality. I want my enemies blown backwards by raw force. This is where other elements of the game come into play to make the shotgun itself better. A perfect example, Gaynor explained, is Bioshock's shotty:

"It reinforces what makes a great shotgun on its own—an awesome muzzle flash, great pump action animation, amazing sound design, and high destructive power—but also how important its effect on enemies can be. Not just the blood effects or how much damage it does, but how they flip, spin, and pirouette through the environment when blasted. BioShock used tech that allowed the enemies to do a crafted death animation—ie spinning through the air in response to catching a handful of buckshot in the side—and transition that smoothly into a dynamic ragdoll that leaves them convincingly sprawled on the environment in the aftermath. Blasting Splicers with the shotgun was great because the shotgun was great, yes, but also because the Splicers were such wonderful fodder, their reaction to your blasting being an integral part of the whole exchange."

This is one area where Valve's typically soft weapons really shine: Left4Dead 2's shotguns can lift a group of zombies off their feet and send them flying. They also absolutely shred enemies. Valve's Alex Vlachos gave a great talk about Left 4 Dead 2's wounds at the 2010 Game Developer's Conference, and you can see how the system works in this presentation. This applies to all weapons, but shotguns are your best bet for blowing off limbs or big chunks of torso.

Gaynor similarly praised the F.E.A.R shotgun's "effect on a highly dynamic gameworld, where firing this thing off causes dust, concrete chunks, and broken glass to fly everywhere. But of course it would be nothing if not for F.E.A.R.'s slow-mo bullet time mechanic, allowing you to enjoy the shotgun's effects at half speed, every frame of its destructive power lovingly rendered for the player's satisfaction. Jumping over a barricade, going into slow-mo, and hearing an enemy soldier shout "OOoooohhhhhh shiiiiiiittttttt" as you pull the trigger, causing him to backflip over a railing with balletic grace, is maybe one of the most satisfying interactions in any FPS game. Oh, and if you play your cards right and get up into point-blank range, this thing can straight-up mist an enemy in one shot. That's how badass it is."

Romero and Bill Munk both called out Soldier of Fortune's shotgun for similar destructive power. "Soldier of Fortune, especially for the time, really showed the brutality of a shotgun and made the player feel extremely powerful based on the gore system," Munk said. "But for overall feel I'd have to give it to F.E.A.R. The first time you experience a shotgun in slow-mo seeing every pellet fly and the ragdoll react to it is a thing of beauty!"

Soldier of Fortune sure wins for nastiness, though.

Gettin' weird with it

God I love the flak cannon. In my imagination, the flak cannon is what would happen if the god of death metal looked at a normal shotgun and turned it into an industrial tool that could conveniently be used to shred men into paste. It's not simply firing a shell when you pull the trigger: a metal piston slams forward to propel a disc the size of a hockey puck out of the muzzle, where it separates into a spreading pattern of glowing superheated scrap. You can watch every piece make bloody contact with your enemy, but it also has a utility unlike any other shotgun: bouncing those metal meteors around corners to shred bad dudes from afar. Is there any wonder it's our favorite gun ever?

When Doom gave us a shotgun to blast demons, it was novel. Now that every shooter has its own take on the shotgun—and it's usually pretty straightforward—we love the flak cannon and other alternative shotguns for stepping out of that mold.

The flak cannon's secondary fire is a perfect example: it concentrates the heavy damage of the shotgun into a single arcing grenade that's harder to land, but offers concentrated damage you won't get at range with a spreading flak cloud. Romero himself designed a shotgun that was meant to diverge from the straightforward utility of Doom's shotgun: Daikatana's Shotcycler-6.

Daikatana had rocket jumping, but because its rocket launcher fired two shots, it would really hurt. "I thought, can I make a safer rocket jump type weapon?" Romero remembered. "With the Shotcycler-6 I can do six shots, and if you jump it'll take you up to another place. I thought that would be kinda cool for people who are good, and know the secret of the shotgun jump. So it's basically six shots, who doesn't love that, with kickback enough that you can actually get propelled up in the air, almost like a rocket launcher."

Gears of War 4's Overkill is a madman's fusion of double-barrel and auto shotty: it fires a shell from one of four barrels on mouse click and on mouse release, giving you the flexibility for tactical timing or a panicked barrage of eight shots in the span of a second.

Bulletstorm's ridiculous four barreled shotgun has a charge shot that simply vaporizes enemies, burning them away to nothing but bones. It's a fitting middle finger to the concept of balance. 

And though it was a short-lived glitch, not an intentional design, I have to sing the praises of the most overpowered shotgun of all time: Battlefield 3's briefly broken underslung M26 DART. A patch made every 12 gauge flechette pellet deal the full damage of the assault rifle's primary bullets, making the spread an ungodly cloud of death. And yet it's so politely soft-spoken.

In conclusion

 Videogame shotguns are rad. When you use a good one, appreciate it: marvel at its kick, its cocking action, its thundercrack, and the knockback like no other.

"There's something inherently satisfying about video game guns that are built to be 'one shot, one kill' like, say, a hefty magnum revolver, or a bolt-action sniper rifle," said Gaynor. "And that's also the shotgun's job... with the added benefit of not really having to aim. Who could ask for more?"

Long live the gib.

Erik Wolpaw, a long-time Valve writer who has worked on game series including Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal, revealed today that he is no longer with the company. Marc Laidlaw, himself a former Valve writer, let the news slip on Twitter, while Wolpaw confirmed it in a status update on his Facebook page. 

Wolpaw joined Valve in 2004, and has credits on Half-Life: Episode One and Two, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Portal 2. Prior to that, he was with Double-Fine, where he co-wrote the outstanding platform-adventure Psychonauts, and before that he was one-half of the brilliant (and sadly defunct) gaming site Old Man Murray. He's currently involved in the development of Psychonauts 2, which was successfully crowdfunded in early 2016.

A reason for Wolpaw's departure wasn't given, but it does appear to be legitimate this time around. A report that he had left Valve also surfaced last summer, but in that case it turned out that he'd just called in sick for the day. 

I've emailed Valve for more information, and will update if and when I received a reply. 

Update: The report originally stated that writer Jay Pinkterton had also left the company, but apparently not.

Left 4 Dead developer Turtle Rock Studios has released its final, unfinished campaign for the zombie shooter, and you can play it right now. All you need is Left 4 Dead and an internet connection to download the files.

Co-founder Chris Ashton posted a link to the campaign on the Turtle Rock forums, saying that the studio had "just finished putting the Dam campaign ... into a L4D add-on."

"It's gray box, and some code features are missing, but it's playable from beginning to end," he wrote. "It also includes two standalone survival maps that never shipped."

You can download the Dam It campaign here. There are two ways to install the addon, with the "automatic" way consisting of unzipping the .vpk file and double clicking it to launch. The "manual" way, on the other hand, requires you to unzip the same file and copy it over to Left 4 Dead's "addons" folder.

The add-on's page says, "Dam It stitches Dead Air and Blood Harvest together." However, because it's an add-on, code changes are not included. This results in a number of issues, including explosions not triggering panic events in the hangars, zombies not crawling consistently in the orchard, and the covered bridge not collapsing with explosions. In addition to the full issue list, you can see a map of the campaign on Dam It's webpage.

Turtle Rock was recently taken off of development of 2K's monster-hunting shooter Evolve. Despite its ceased development, its servers could still stay active, as long as 2K wants to keep them up.

"[Keeping servers up will] all be up to 2K on out, the same as anything Left 4 Dead related is in Valve's hands," Ashton wrote to a fan on Turtle Rock's forums.