Valve itself “leaked” the 2009 Left 4 Dead 2 trailer.

That’s according to former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who revealed in a recent video about lines cut from the game that the developer had clashed with the ratings board over the game’s violence, gore, and profanity.

“For Left 4 Dead 2 with the ESRB… we leaked our trailer ahead of time because they wouldn’t let us release the trailer,” he said in the video below (thanks, Ars Technica).

“You have to remember… Valve was in fights with the ESRB, with Australia, with Germany, with a bunch of countries about the profanity in the game, the violence,” Faliszek said.

“I’ll just admit that [we leaked the trailer]. I think we can’t get in trouble for that now. It’s like 20 years ago.”

Valve had already clashed with the ESRB earlier that same year over an early promotional image that showed a hand with three fingers gnawed off, leaving two intact to signal the sequel number. The ESRB objected, and Valve had to rework the image to the one we now know, which has the missing fingers merely curled under instead.

Around the same time, the ratings board had also forced D3’s Dark Sector and 2K’s The Darkness to remove trailers that had already circulated behind age gates, arguing the content was likely to “cause serious offense to the average consumer”.

So instead of submitting the Left 4 Dead 2 trailer for approval, Valve seeded it as an unofficial leak. The footage later became the game’s actual intro cinematic and Left 4 Dead 2 received an M rating, sidestepping the more restrictive AO rating handed to Manhunt 2 two years earlier.

Left 4 Dead 2 was released in 2009, but it took until 2021 for the first-person zombie shooter to be released in Germany after it was pulled from sale shortly after launch. Over a decade after Left 4 Dead 2 came out, Valve requested the German authorities re-evaluate the zombie shooter, and as a result, the uncut international version was finally made available in the country.