L4D Lombardi Interview - 5/1/08

TVG sat down with Valve's marketing man Doug Lombardi to talk about Left 4 Dead. It starts off with the normal jibba jabba introducing the game, but a large portion dealt with Michael Booth and Valve's acquiring of Turtle Rock:

TVG: I understand this title was originally developed by Turtle Rock, Valve then acquired Turtle Rock, and you've been developing the title since?

Well, we were working together before that. It was always a co-production. They were working on Counter-Strike Source, and before that they did Counter-Strike for the Xbox. We wanted to hire Michael Booth back when we met him at E3 2003 I think it was, and he wouldn't leave Southern California for the rain of Seattle.

So we said, 'Okay, why don't you setup shop down there?' And he's an ex-Westwood guy so he started slowly picking off people from Blizzard South and ex-Westwood people - his old friends - to come and work with him on these projects. And, in the background of developing those Counter-Strike projects, he was sort of prototyping Left 4 Dead and coming up with really rough versions. We would playtest it, give him feedback and eventually it evolved into this. Over time we've had people that got interested up in Seattle who wanted to keep working on it and it just got to a point where we were like, 'You know, we're kind of like one company with two offices. Why don't we just go ahead and make this official?'

It's a good read, so head on over to TVG. They have also posted a 'first look preview' which states their concerns over the Xbox 360 version's retail viability (being multiplayer-focused) and a more general introduction to the game, find it here.