O
ne commonly accepted piece of games
industry wisdom is that ideas are cheap;
everybody has them. It’s the execution
that’s difficult and expensive. But it’s
evidently not a philosophy shared by
Valve, which has long bought its best ideas.Counter-Strike, Portal, Team Fortress, Dota – all were
first dreamed up outside Valve by modders or students.
Again and again, the studio has acted as a kind of
incubator – hiring on creators and giving them resources
and expertise, so that they can take those magic ideas to
their big-budget conclusion.
Often, in time, those creators fade into the grey
anonymity of Valve – contributing to the studio’s brain
trust in ways both crucial and imperceptible to the
general public. But one team has retained not only its
distinct identity but a degree of wider recognition: Turtle
Rock, the outfit behind Left 4 Dead.
Perhaps that’s because Turtle Rock built the vast
majority of its most famous game as an independent.
Valve had reason to trust the studio – as a contractor,
Turtle Rock had effectively become the custodian of
Counter-Strike – and so largely left its team alone during
Left 4 Dead’s development, providing funding and the
services of acclaimed Portal writer Chet Faliszek.
Valve’s greatest contribution to Left 4 Dead was
actually the organic and full-throated enthusiasm of its
staff, who quickly adopted the game for their play sessions
outside work. They demonstrated the argument – so
obvious to us now – that the FPS genre was missing a
trick with casual co-op. Turtle Rock was reacting against
Counter-Strike’s baked-in competition; put simply, the
team was sick of fighting each other.COUNTER, TERROR
What began as a goofy CS mod named Terror – in which
bloodily-textured bots armed with knives ran eerily at a
squad of four friends – became the follow-up to
Half-Life 2. Valve acquired its developer briefly before
launch, which meant Turtle Rock’s name wasn’t on the
box. But not long afterwards, the studio spun out on its
own again. As Valve South, the team had missed its
independence, and struggled to communicate with itscolleagues 800 miles away in Seattle. In the end, it was
Gabe Newell who suggested a return to the way things
had been – signing back Turtle Rock’s name and logo.
Valve would handle Left 4 Dead 2 internally, while Turtle
Rock worked on its DLC (as well as more Counter-Strike,
the studio’s spiritual default).
As you know, Left 4 Dead changed the industry.
Alongside 28 Days Later, it rehabilitated cheesy old
zombies in pop culture, rendering them terrifying once
again with a simple speed buff. What’s more, Turtle
Rock’s easygoing, chat-friendly approach to PvE – in
which it paid to put the team before yourself – paved the
way for COD: Zombies, Payday, and Vermintide.
Yet it was the game’s lesser-played Versus mode that
mapped a path to the studio’s future. There, four players
took on the roles of the Special Infected, mastering
bizarre abilities with the goal of halting and separating a
team of survivors as they pushed through a campaign
map. Where competitive shooters had traditionally
balanced two teams with identical toolsets, Left 4 Dead
embraced asymmetry, asking zombie players to become
walking bombs and sentient lassos.STAGE TWO
Evolve took that imbalance to its logical endpoint, tipping
the seesaw as far as it would go. Turtle Rock’s sophomore
effort cast a single player as a monster, and four others as
the hunters tasked with trapping and killing the beast.
One side was playing a co-op shooter in the mould of
Predator; the other a strange stealth game about
troughing on an alien ecosystem until you were so
engorged as to be unstoppable.
“This ain’t about just running around and shooting bad
guys like you’re some kind of goddamned Navy Seal orBACK FROM THE DEAD
How TURTLE ROCK STUDIOS righted itself after rolling on its backBELOW: (^) Boom boom
boom boom,please
give me some room.
4 + 1 = 0
The great asymmetrical multiplayer struggle
FABLE LEGENDS
Lionhead’slastbig
project installed one
player as the
Dungeon Master,
working against four
heroes as they
embarked on high
fantasy quests. But
it died with the
developer.
SHADOW
REALMS
Built by the Bioware
studio behind Star
Wars: The Old
Republic. The
Shadowlord would
have controlled
creatures and set
traps – if it hadn’t
been scrapped.
DEAD BY
DAYLIGHT
The exception to the
curse: aplayable
slasher flick in which
one player becomes
the killer. So
successful that it’s
hosted monsters
from Halloween and
Stranger Things.
N E WS | O P I N I ON | D E V E L O PME N T