Is this the game developer equivalent of having a dodgy tab open when your family wants to use your computer? I think it is. Tristan Reidford, conceptual artist at Valve created a tutorial for Valve’s new Destinations Workshop Tools. The tutorial shows a picture of Reidford’s desktop with a Windows 7 menu that clearly shows a folder that reads ‘left4dead3’.
Now before any of you get too excited, Valve could simply be having a little fun. The file that was found in the ‘left4dead3’ folder was named ‘08_directory_fun.png’. As in, we’re having fun look at the directory which is named after game we may be making. To add fuel to the fire, the image showing off the ‘left4dead3’ folder has been poorly edited (once people found it) to remove any traces of it. However, this is the internet, so you know that’s not going to last.
A lot of people have been looking into Reidford’s Steam profile. It shows he has been playing Left 4 Dead 2 a lot recently, but the amount of time he has been playing doesn’t add up. It says the developer has 49 hours of L4D2 on record, but it also says he has played 348.5 hours of games in the past two weeks. Of course, this may simply be a case of the employees at Valve running a specific program that may not work properly with Steam. It’s not like you are going to see Valve employees being in-game running Half Life 3, that would ruin the surprise a little bit.
We have to wonder whether or not Valve did accidentally leak anything, or if they are just messing with everyone online. Valve are notoriously careful when it comes to leaks, I mean, it took a random hacker to steal files from Valve’s servers before Half Life 2 launched. Nothing really gets past them, which is why this ‘leak’ is such a deal. If this is indeed true, hopefully Left 4 Dead 3 comes soon.
