Valve secretly leaked a Left 4 Dead 2 trailer to dodge the ESRB

Back in 2009, Ars wrote about what was being reported as a leaked trailer for the then-upcoming Left 4 Dead 2, saying the footage “looks like it’s straight from a high-gloss action movie.” Today, we need to offer an important update to this crucial, 17-year-old story: The trailer “leak” was orchestrated by Valve itself. That news comes courtesy of former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who said in a newly posted video about cut lines in the game that “for Left 4 Dead 2 with the ESRB… we leaked our trailer ahead of time because they wouldn’t let us release the trailer.” Faliszek is referring to the Entertainment Software Rating Board, the self-regulating industry group that, since 1994, has offered sometimes questionable age-appropriateness ratings for thousands of games submitted to its purview. While many smaller and/or online-focused game makers skip out on getting those ratings these days, at the time, any publisher that wanted space on major retailers’ shelves needed to submit to the ESRB’s standards. According to Faliszek, Valve decided to get around this potential enforcement action for the Left 4 Dead 2 trailer by simply seeding it as a “leaked” version that it knew would quickly spread around the Internet to effectively market the game (even to those who were loudly planning to boycott its release). At the time, though, some people doubted the purported “unofficial” nature of the trailer’s release, as evidenced by this contemporaneous Reddit thread. “You have to remember… Valve was in fights with the ESRB, with Australia, with Germany, with a bunch of countries about the profanity in the game, the violence,” Faliszek said in his recent video. “I’ll just admit that [we leaked the trailer]. I think we can’t get in trouble for that now. It’s like 20 years ago.”