Left 4 Dead/Trivia

Useful Notes! Anything that requires more than two sentences to explain is and belongs on the other L4D Wiki.

Items and Weapons

 * Healthpacks: They heal 80% of your injuries(cancelling all temporary health) and reset your incap count, rather than healing an exact amount of health. The more health you have, the less effective healthpacks are.
 * "International" version weapons: If you come across a weapon you haven't seen before in L4D2, it's because you're playing with someone that has the German version of the game or are playing a sever that enables them.
 * (L4D2) A Bile-Bomb will spawn a horde if there aren't enough Infected nearby for it to attract
 * (L4D2) Using Adrenaline allows you to run at maximum speed, even when water or infected hitting you would ordinarily slow you down. (i.e. Hard Rain)

Infected

 * Hunter pounce damage: Not determined by how high above the survivors you reach, but rather how far the spot you jump from is to where you land.
 * Boomer vomit has a sort of cooldown effect. If a boomer explodes on someone that has been vomited on, the effects won't stack and will wear off when the vomit was timed to normally.
 * Teamwork is just as important for the infected team as it is for the survivors. If you don't attack with your teammates, even mediocre survivors will make all your attacks worthless.
 * All playable infected make noise when they spawn or attack. If someone killed you quickly after they spawned, they picked up on your location with surround sound and shot through a wall.
 * In L4D Campaign Mode, Tanks run faster on fire than survivors can run and have a scripted death after ~sixty seconds rather than take damage from the fire.
 * Different weapons have different effectiveness on tanks.
 * You can free Survivors from Hunters, Smokers and Jockeys with a melee attack.
 * Chargers must be killed for their victim to be freed.
 * When a Smoker is pulling a Survivor towards them, you can free them by meleeing the Survivor or the Smoker, killing the Smoker or shooting the tongue itself.
 * When a Survivor is snared by a Hunter/Smoker/Jockey/Charger, bullets will pass straight through them.
 * (L4D) You can distract a Tank from his incapacitated target with a melee attack (provided the incapacitatee isn't shooting the Tank)
 * A Tank will always chase after a Survivor using a mounted machinegun.
 * You can destroy the rocks thrown by Tanks with gunfire.

Survivors

 * Friendly fire adjusts depending on the difficulty (Easy is 0%, Normal (and Versus/Scavenge) is 10%, Advanced is 50%, and Expert is full damage).

Other Useful Notes

 * A Boomer's vomit ALWAYS overrides a Bile Bomb's effects, but not that of a pipebomb.
 * Witches will chase after someone who disturbed her, but she will always go after someone else if they set her on fire.
 * If you're directly between a Witch and her target, she might just jump you
 * Chainsaws and Guns will attract idle common infected to you due to noise.

Actual Trivia

 * The German version of the game is censored for violence, and is more difficult as a result (you can't tell if a Hunter is on fire because the flames would be censored) so a number of weapons are ported from Counter-Strike. The Australian version of the game is also censored, but they don't get bonus weapons.
 * Valve is infamously known for their Valve Time where they either set a date for a release for something and it gets delayed (sometimes several times) or they don't mention a release date at all until the product is good and ready to ship out. Left 4 Dead 2 is one of the few exceptions to the rule; the game was released one year after the original Left 4 Dead due to Valve wanting to prove that they can release on a fixed schedule. This action caused a Broken Base and it's best to leave it at that.
 * Actor Allusion: Coach is played by Cutty Wise from The Wire, who was an ex-con that finally found his calling... as a boxing coach.
 * Banned in China: Due to rules against the depiction of violence towards authority figures, the Riot Infected were absent from the censored version released in Germany and Australia, though they were later put back in by a patch.
 * The Danza: Rochelle is voiced by Rochelle Aytes.
 * Defictionalization: Valve started selling interactive Boomer plushies from their website.
 * Fan Nickname: The female Boomer is often referred to as a Boomette. The nickname actually originated from the game files.
 * Hey, It's That Voice!: Most of the NPC Survivors are played by guys who also did voices for Team Fortress 2. For the curious the boat man is the Sniper, the infected helicopter pilot is both the Spy and Pyro, and the pilot in Dead Air is the Demoman and Heavy.
 * Bill is Father Grigori.
 * Zoey is also Cortana and Princess Peach. For some, it might feel funny to use a baseball bat as her.
 * Or Cate Archer. They pretty much have the exact same voice.
 * Coach is Cutty Wise.
 * Ellis is Jamie Wright and William Hofstadt.
 * Meanwhile, users of the French dub get their Keith tales off the mouth of Eikichi Onizuka.
 * Some people might wonder why Ellis didn't grow electrical powers and fry the zombies.
 * You might recognize Hugh Dillon (Nick) from Flashpoint or his singing career.
 * The crazy church guy is the Scout.
 * The infected have been voiced by The Darkness, The Hulk and Appa.
 * Too Soon: A writer for the Houston Chronicle accused Valve of this for setting a game in ruined New Orleans. A few million extended middle fingers in his direction later, the game was released anyway.
 * Urban Legend of Zelda:
 * A rumor was immediately born after The Passing was released and was debunked just as quickly.
 * One myth that many believe to this day is healing each other with first aid kits instead of using them on yourself will make the director spawn more first aid kits due to using more "teamwork." There has been no concrete proof of this.
 * This myth likely alludes to the first game's health bonus in versus where healing teammates, passing pills to the weakest survivor and the like raised the bonus by a few points. Final score is tallied by:
 * 1. Percentage of the map complete
 * 2. Health bonus
 * 3. Map difficulty multiplier
 * 4. Survival multiplier (x1 ~ x4)
 * Taking the time to pass around some pills carefully on the finale might raise your bonus by five, surviving with everyone multiplies by four and to top it off, the x2 multiplier for map 5 nets you forty extra points than you would have had. Completely removed in the sequel much to the dismay of the competitive community.
 * What Could Have Been:
 * Louis was originally envisioned looking more like a bum.
 * Valve almost used the same face model for Zoey that they did for Chell, but changed their minds.
 * Rochelle went through a lot character changes during development. Rochelle had her face and hair style changed a few times, and tweaks to her clothes as well. None of the screen shots and videos pre-release were consistent on whether her hair was an afro pony tail, dread locks, or corn rows.
 * The Hunter was originally designed to be able to hang from the ceiling and jump down onto the survivors, and be able to turn invisible. Fortunately, it was taken out, due to it not being realistic. This is possibly based on a mod of Half-Life called The Hidden.
 * There was almost a DLC with based on the plot of The Cabin in the Woods, and Valve was working directly with both Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon in order to create it, intending its release to coincide with the film's debut. However, when the movie's release date was pushed from 2010 to 2012, the project was scrapped. A few characters and monsters from the movie still appear in the game as Easter Eggs. Goddard himself has confirmed this, claiming the DLC was "amazing" (by his account) and would have involved players fighting in both the above-ground area and the underground facility, further stating that "It pains me that it didn't happen."