"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.
