L4D2 Spitter ‘invented’ by L4D2 Boycotter

They say similar passions lead to a convergence of ideas and Valve has, up until the growing Left 4 Dead 2 boycott, traditionally had a very close relationship with its fans. So it’s slightly ironic, but not entirely surprising, that earlier this year one of them,  who now also happens to be part of the vocal L4D2 boycott group, came up with a similar  idea for an infected boss character as the recently revealed Spitter in L4D2.

In a Steam L4D Community forum post back in May of this year, Walking_Target, a leading member of the L4D2 Boycott group, which fears releasing Left 4 Dead 2 as a new game rather than updates of the original will split the community, posted an idea for a new infected that’s strikingly similar to the new  ‘Spitter’ detailed by Valve last week.

In response to an initial angry reaction by some fans that Valve had ‘ripped off’ his idea, Walking_ Target posted an announcement on the L4D2 boycott forums attributing the similarities to coincidence rather than theft- saying it shouldn’t be taken the wrong way.

“There has been a lot of commotion on the Steam Forums about how ‘The Charger’ was a stolen idea from a fan,” wrote Walking_Target on the forum, “and now a similar commotion is being raised about “The Spitter”.  The first reaction of these folks, including myself, is to think ‘Hey, they ripped me off”. This is not really the case though.

In reality, when you come right down to it, it is far more likely that there were already similar ideas to this already floating around, these people just happened to be the only ones, or the first ones on that venue to post about it.

This is most likely the case for the new Special Infected in Left 4 Dead 2. Valve most likely foresaw similar solutions to the ones posted, probably before it was ever mentioned on the forums,” he adds.

Like many others in the L4D2 boycott group however, Walking_Target still feels that Valve would best serve its L4D community by incorporating the new infected into the original game to ‘fix problems’  there rather than creating a new game.

The Left 4 Dead boycott group is now more than 40, 000 strong and still growing, so it’ll be interesting to see how much of an effect that’ll have on the games release on November 17th this year