Capcom and Valve swap game characters

Valve and Capcom have revealed plans to make well-known characters from two of their most beloved franchises playable in each other’s games.

Left 4 Dead and Resident Evil share the common theme of dead people chasing the living about in the hopes of scaring consumers into a purchase, but this is largely where the similarities end.

Resident Evil has long been marketed towards the console crowd, and is a single player game in which the survival horror elements have been slowly killed off with each successive iteration.

Left 4 Dead is a multi-player game that combines the fast-paced action of Counter-Strike with an AI "director" that places weapons, ammo, health, and swarms of hungry dead wherever they are most likely to give the user a frightfully good time.

Both games also have a cast of characters their fan bases have grown to love, and so Capcom has decided to borrow the four survivors from Valve’s zombie shooter as playable characters in the hopes of drawing out the furtive PC gaming crowd in support of its April 5 release of Resident Evil 6 on Steam.

For its end of the cross-promotion, Valve will release an update for Left 4 Dead 2 featuring enemies from Resident Evil 6.