20 years later, Left 4 Dead 2 lead admits Valve’s team leaked their own trailer because the ESRB blocked them from officially releasing it: “We can’t get in trouble for that now”

“We leaked our trailer,” admits Left 4 Dead 2 project lead and Valve veteran Chet Faliszek in a new YouTube video. “I think we can’t get in trouble for that now, it’s like 20 years ago,” he then says, with an air of mild nervousness about him.

In his YouTube confessional, Faliszek explains that the ESRB had originally blocked Valve from releasing a trailer for Left 4 Dead 2 which, in the opinion of the ratings board at the time, was too graphic to publish. The video is actually about the fabled “lost lines” from Left 4 Dead that were cut from the game but unearthed in the game files, but at a certain point Faliszek lets it slip that a leaked version of an early trailer was actually put out there by the development team at Valve itself, which is a pretty bold move.

“We leaked our trailer ahead of time because they wouldn’t let us release the trailer … so it’s funny seeing leaked stuff now, because I don’t think you can look for leaked Left 4 Dead 2 trailer, cause it’s lost now,” says Faliszek. “But yeah, it originally got leaked because we had this with the ESRB, so that’s why a lot of the language had to get toned down.”

I would say that late ’00s Valve is a very different Valve to today’s Valve, and that the sort of hijinks they pulled back then wouldn’t ever happen today, but honestly, it’s pretty miraculous how the decades have failed to whittle down the company’s reputation as a fiercely independent anomaly that marches to the beat of its own drum, ESRB ratings be damned.

Steam earned Valve $15 billion in revenue so far this year, with Crimson Desert alone topping $203 million according to analyst

After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar’s west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I’m responsible for managing the site’s western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I’m too afraid to finish.