When Valve acquired Turtle Rock Studios last year, many soon started to believe that TRS was dissolved and the employees let go. Without any facts to back up those claims, the rumor still continued to hold strong for months. Gamasutra caught up with Doug Lombardi at E3 to set the record straight.
Gamasutra also learned a little bit about how Left 4 Dead 2 development began. Tom Leonard from Valve and project lead on Left 4 Dead 2 explains how the game began.
Left 4 Dead is slated for a November release on the Xbox 360 and PC.
"It's not like we shut it down. We bought the studio and we're still working with, I think, every single person from the studio," Lombardi explained.
The exec referred back to the situation leading up to the acquisition to better frame the events:
"Turtle Rock was just Mike at the beginning, and after he refused to move to Seattle, we said [to] start hiring people and build prototypes for what became Left 4 Dead, which was called Terror at the time," Lombardi recalled. "Finally, we said, you guys are a bunch of contractors working under Turtle Rock Studios; why don't we just call you Valve South?"
But after the game was complete, the traditional Valve practice of team members moving around to different projects was more difficult in the context of a remote location.
"Kim Swift, who was on Portal, really liked Left 4 Dead and wanted to work on Left 4 Dead 2, so we said, okay, work on Left 4 Dead 2," he said. "With the remote office, we wanted to give them that freedom, but it ended up closing down that space."
After several members of the Valve South team -- which Lombardi described as only ever numbering "nine or 11 in total" -- moved up to Bellevue, the remaining staff were not enough to justify a fully-fledged studio.
At that scale, "the idea of having an office with a receptionist and all of that kind of goes out the window," Lombardi said. As far as Booth and his current team, "that group of people looks like the original Turtle Rock again, and I think they may even prefer to call themselves that," he added.
The exec referred back to the situation leading up to the acquisition to better frame the events:
"Turtle Rock was just Mike at the beginning, and after he refused to move to Seattle, we said [to] start hiring people and build prototypes for what became Left 4 Dead, which was called Terror at the time," Lombardi recalled. "Finally, we said, you guys are a bunch of contractors working under Turtle Rock Studios; why don't we just call you Valve South?"
But after the game was complete, the traditional Valve practice of team members moving around to different projects was more difficult in the context of a remote location.
"Kim Swift, who was on Portal, really liked Left 4 Dead and wanted to work on Left 4 Dead 2, so we said, okay, work on Left 4 Dead 2," he said. "With the remote office, we wanted to give them that freedom, but it ended up closing down that space."
After several members of the Valve South team -- which Lombardi described as only ever numbering "nine or 11 in total" -- moved up to Bellevue, the remaining staff were not enough to justify a fully-fledged studio.
At that scale, "the idea of having an office with a receptionist and all of that kind of goes out the window," Lombardi said. As far as Booth and his current team, "that group of people looks like the original Turtle Rock again, and I think they may even prefer to call themselves that," he added.
Gamasutra also learned a little bit about how Left 4 Dead 2 development began. Tom Leonard from Valve and project lead on Left 4 Dead 2 explains how the game began.
"The team got back together in early November, and we were all really excited to continue to expand the Left 4 Dead experience," Leonard recalled. "We hit the white board and came up with ideas about how we could expand the experience -- new characters, new locations, new positioning on the timeline of the infection, new game mechanics."
"As we started talking that through, it became clear that we weren't really talking about incremental updates; we were talking about a whole experience. And it would be hard to deliver that totality of experience in incremental bits."
"So I proposed to people, 'Why don't we try to make a sequel and do it in a year?' Everyone thought I was crazy, but as I talked them through the strategy of how to do it, the team collectively said, 'Yeah, that's interesting.'"
"As we started talking that through, it became clear that we weren't really talking about incremental updates; we were talking about a whole experience. And it would be hard to deliver that totality of experience in incremental bits."
"So I proposed to people, 'Why don't we try to make a sequel and do it in a year?' Everyone thought I was crazy, but as I talked them through the strategy of how to do it, the team collectively said, 'Yeah, that's interesting.'"
Left 4 Dead is slated for a November release on the Xbox 360 and PC.