Giant Bomb Video Game News

Magnifying the problem was the fact that there wasn't much point to having our four heroes standing around in a void. To give the box art any sort of context to the game inside, we needed zombies. So we were faced with the unpopular idea of shrinking our heroes down even more to cram some zombies into the picture.

These attempts did a good job of capturing the multiplayer aspect of L4D, not to mention the intensity of the gameplay experience. But when viewed from a distance—by someone walking through a game store and spotting it on a shelf, for instance—it just looked like cluttered noise. The individual elements were too small and varied to communicate anything visually interesting.