Turtle Rock Studios (known as Valve South between 2008 and 2010) is an American video game developer founded in March 2002 by Michael Booth. It was acquired by Valve in 2008, but was re-founded in 2010 as a subsidiary of Slamfire Inc. by Phil Robb and Chris Ashton. Turtle Rock Studios is involved in the creation of original titles as well as the provision of consulting services to the digital entertainment industry.
The company's most notable games are: the first Left 4 Dead, which was published by Valve; and Evolve, which was originally set to be published by THQ but was later published by 2K Games. The founder of the company had worked for Westwood Pacific, and assisted in the development of the Counter-Strike series. The company expanded from six employees to more than seventy staff members from 2011 to 2014 and opened a subsidiary company called Turtle Rock Garage in 2011, which specialized in developing casual and experimental games for platforms such as iPhone, Facebook, and Xbox Live. Tencent acquired the company in December 2021.
History
Prior to founding
Turtle Rock Studios was founded by Michael Booth. Prior to the company's establishment, Booth, Phil Robb and Chris Ashton worked for Westwood Pacific and participated in the development of real-time strategy games like Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. Ashton, who had also worked for Presto Studios, was impressed by Counter-Strike, which was a popular mod of Half-Life, and decided to join the mod team as a texture artist. Eventually, Seattle-based Valve, the publisher of Half-Life, purchased the mod, and Ashton left Westwood to join Valve. Robb and Booth remained at Westwood Studios and worked on Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge and Command & Conquer: Generals, but left the company after it was acquired by Electronic Arts, as Robb considered EA's acquisition of Westwood had resulted in the studio losing all its personality.
Turtle Rock (2002-2007) Turtle Rock Studios was founded in 2002. The team of about six people had limited resources so set up work space in Booth's garage. The name "Turtle Rock" derived from the name of a neighbourhood where Booth lived. The team expanded the studio and rented an office, and continued the development of Condition Zero. The game was released in 2004. Satisfied with the work done by Turtle Rock, Valve continued to contract them to work on the Xbox version of Counter-Strike, as well as the next installment of the series, Counter-Strike: Source, and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. Upon the release of Source, the company wanted to work on a new game, and gained support from Valve. The team later chose to design a first-person wizard combat game.
As the team had developed only competitive multiplayer games before, they wanted to design a game that encouraged and supported co-operative gameplay between players; a game that would allow family and friends to play together instead of against each other, citing Secret of Mana as an example. The team decided to use source code from Counter-Strike to develop a mod called Terror-Strike, which is a scenario where players fight against bots, which are equipped only with knives and act like zombies. They also changed the texture of the game to create a gritty, dark atmosphere. It was not conceived as a full-budget project at that time. Meanwhile, the wizard combat game was scrapped as the team considered the project over-complicated and "geeky"; they decided to use the cancelled project as a prototype to work on the zombie game. The idea of developing a zombie game grew after the team watched 28 Days Later, a critically acclaimed zombie film. The film helped the team brainstorm ideas for their zombie game. After that, the team decided to remove all the Counter-Strike content and started developing the zombie game, in which players have to plant zombie bait and kill all the zombies present in the level. The focus later shifted to evacuating and surviving in a zombie-infested area. The project was later presented to Valve, which helped the game's funding and publishing. The project's name was Left 4 Dead, and its development began in 2005. The title was announced on November 20, 2006, and was released in November 2008 for Microsoft Windows and the Xbox 360.