Valve's Doug Lombardi dropped word with the folks at Halflife2.net on the official, 100% legit, absolutely bunkum-free hardware requirements needed for Left 4 Dead. What's it gonna take to run the game? A CPU better the ones in the Kotaku Towers West supercomputers, sadly. It's OK, you kids have fun with all that zombie killing, we'll just do some Peggle. While not steep — though that 7.5 GB install is impressive — we just don't have the video card or central processing power to run the thing.

• OS: Windows Vista, XP or 2000
• CPU: 3.0 GHz P4, Dual Core 2.0 or AMD64X2 (or higher)
• RAM: 1 GB for XP / 2GB for Vista
• DISC DRIVE: DVD-ROM Drive
• HARD DRIVE: At least 7.5 GB of free space
• VIDEO: Direct X 9 compatible video card (Video card must be 256 MB or more and should be a DirectX 9-compatible with support for pixel shader 2.0)
• SOUND: Direct X9.0c compatible sound card

Time for an upgrade! That, or coming to terms with playing the Xbox 360 version. *shudder*

Left 4 Dead Official System Requirements [HalfLife2.net Forums via Shacknews]

Send an email to Michael McWhertor, the author of this post, at mike@kotaku.com.