[Rumor] Valve Employee Accidentally Leaks Existence of Left 4 Dead 3

Published: July 1, 2016 10:33 AM /

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The gaming industry has a tendency to accidentally leak info about upcoming games. Some of these leaks turn out to be either intentionally leaked to create hype, with only some of them actually being an unintentional peek into things that may yet see the light of day. Seeing as this is a leak from Valve about the highly-anticipated Left 4 Dead 3, a usually pretty tight-lipped developer, it could turn into something extra interesting. 

The leak in question came from a tutorial for Valve's Destinations Workshop Tools by Valve concept artist Tristan Reidford. This tutorial came with a bunch of screenshots, and one of them included a screenshot of a folder that reads 'left4dead3' in the sidebar of the Windows File Explorer.

tristan-l4d3-folder-tease

The image above vanished from the internet pretty quickly, and a new image that had the 'left4dead3' folder had any mention of it edited out. This might turn out to be nothing but a red herring, though. Upon inspecting the 'left4dead3' folder, people found one file in the folder that was named '08_directory_fun.png', which could point to Valve having a bit of a laugh at the internet's expense. 

But the internet would just not be the internet if this hadn't sparked an online search for the truth. People turned to Reidford's Steam Profile and found that the concept artist had been playing Left 4 Dead 2 more lately, with a total playtime of 49 hours played. What's interesting is that Reidford had played 348.5 hours worth of games the past few weeks. A possible explanation for this might be Steam not registering the games properly, or maybe Reidford was using a third-party app that interfered with the Steam service in some way. 

So maybe none of this is true and all of this is just Valve poking some fun, but maybe it wasn't!

What do you think of this supposed leak? Do you think there is any truth to it? Let us know in the comments!

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Chris Anderson
| Staff Writer

I've been playing games since I was just barely able to walk so I might as well write about them.