The campaign starts on top of The Vannah Hotel which was once CEDA's central operations and evacuation base but which is now overrun and partially ablaze. The Survivors arrive on the hotel rooftop just too late to board the last evacuation helicopter. With no other option open to them, they all agree that the best thing to do is to get across town to the other CEDA facility at the Liberty Mall.
Their subsequent quest takes them down through the burning hotel, out on to the overrun streets to a gun store from whence they enter the Liberty Mall only find that it too has been overrun by the Infected. Left to their fate, the Survivors elect to escape to New Orleans by refueling the 1969 Dodge Charger formerly run by a local stock car ace named Jimmy Gibbs Junior and which was fortuitously on public display in the mall at the time of the Infection's outbreak.
The campaign poster is the only Left 4 Dead 2 poster that features melee weapons.
It is also the only poster that features no firearms.
Rochelle is shown dual wielding a Chainsaw and a Machete — a feat that is impossible in-game.
Coach and Rochelle are holding Machetes. However, Machetes can only be found in Swamp Fever, The Parish, and the ported versions of "Death Toll" and Blood Harvest. However, it is possible that Machetes were planned to be usable in this campaign early in development, but the concept was subsequently scrapped later on.
The Machetes are also notably much longer than the ones seen in-game.
Like Dark Carnival, the tagline had been suggested on internet forums several times before its public reveal.
This campaign's plotline is consistent with the "shopping mall cliché" found in other zombie media, such as the video game Dead Rising and the movie Dawn of the Dead.
The city of Savannah has no three-story malls in real life.
The letters "AIR"
The poster for Dead Air can be seen to the left of this campaign's poster in the loading screen. There also is an additional poster below that of Dead Center, most likely that for Dead Air as well — or perhaps Crash Course.
This is the only campaign which guarantees laser sights. In the second chapter, The Streets, there is always a laser sight upgrade in Whitaker's Gun Shop. A laser sight is very rarely found in all the other Left 4 Dead 2 campaigns. Oddly enough, in one of the CEDA tents near the safe room, another laser sight upgrade can spawn.
Along with The Passing, Hard Rain and ported campaigns from the original game, Dead Center does not spawn the female Boomer due to the fact that the console variableno_female_boomers is set to 1. The reason for this is unknown.
The campaign's name appears to be a quadruple play on words: shopping malls are often called "shopping centers", everyone in the center is dead (or Infected), a perfect shot strikes dead center, and dead centers are lifeless zones.
On the campaign poster, one can see the caption: "Stunt/Fight Coordinator Jimmy Gibbs."
Dead Center and the Left 4 Dead 2 ports of No Mercy and The Sacrifice are the only campaigns where two Uncommon Infected can appear simultaneously.
When seeing an Infected for the first time in the Hotel, Ellis will sometimes say that he has never seen the Infected before: "Dude those zombies are REAL. I knew them books were non-fiction." This seems to be inconsistent, as it is highly improbable that the Survivors had not encountered Infected before this point.
