Evolve developer Turtle Rock Studios has enjoyed their success with Valve and loves the studio deeply, but working as a satellite studio to another developer led to them parting ways. Speaking with Eurogamer, co-founder Phil Robb described the experience on Left 4 Dead development in collaboration with Valve. Turtle Rock was located in Lake Forest, California at the time, Valve in Seattle. Robb said:
Co-developing and working on one product, when both teams, two super tight-knit teams, are 800 miles apart, it’s a nightmare.
There was a lot of tripping over each other. At the end of the day, after we shipped it, no-one was really happy with how it worked.
Robb expressed frustration over “Valve time,” the studios non-standard project management approach. He continued:
Whenever we were working with Valve, it was kind of crazy. They take their time, y’know? Valve time’s a well-known thing, but for us it was like we want to get this shit done.
Turtle Rock “had a really great working relationship with Valve for like six years” before Valve bought the team. Despite the development issues during Left 4 Dead, the two companies worked together enough to resolve any issues to satisfy everyone. Robb continued:
We sat down with Gabe [Newell] and talked about it, and it just made the most sense that, y’know, why don’t we go back to what we knew worked, which is us going independent again, and certainly they’d have work for us.
The culture changed a lot when we became Valve, and not all of it was what we felt was the right way to go, and it wasn’t the way that we wanted to work.
Once we came back out we got a lot of it back. We had most of the Turtle Rock guys who stuck with us, and for the most part that team’s still with us. Our culture has changed, but I feel really good about the way things are going.
Turtle Rock Studios’ upcoming title Evolve looks to be one of the best games coming out this year. What do you think of the brand new trailer shown off yesterday?
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