Turtle Rock Studios acquired by Valve

After years of teaming up with Turtle Rock Studios Valve have eventually decided to make the studio part of their own company.

The team have, for a number of years, helped create content for games such as Counter Strike: Source and Counter Strike: Zero, and more recently have been developing upcoming multiplayer zombie shooter Left 4 Dead.

Whilst Valve originally set out to simply distribute Left 4 Dead, they have since acquired the Southern California-based development team.

“Given our expectations for Left 4 Dead and our long-standing relationships with members of the Turtle Rock team, this was an easy decision,” said Valve’s CEO Gabe Newell.

Left 4 Dead is a multiplayer game that’s quite possibly set to change the way people co-operatively play online. The game features four playable survivors that must help each other to make their way through a series of quite different areas, each location being swarmed with hideous amounts of equally hideous infected (ex?) humans.

The game was hugely popular at Quakecon this year, with hordes of people gathering like, er, zombies to get a chance to have a go.

Head over to the game hub for more on the game.

Left 4 Dead is to be released in 2008, sometime during the second quarter of the year.