This may be a map that successfully convinced G Fat.
In March 2004, the Counter-Strike expansion pack Counter-Strike: Operation Zero (CS:CZ) was released. The ill-fated work was developed alternately by at least four studios, and the final one responsible for its completion was Turtle Rock, which was founded in 2002.
Turtle Rock had written AI code for robot players for CS, which made it possible for subsequent CS-based stand-alone content. CS:CZ has a single-player campaign called "Deleted Scenes" consisting of dozens of missions, which was the work of Turtle Rock, who combined content designed by previous studios into a complete mission package.
"Cut Content" is a well-designed task script
A few months later, Counter-Strike: Origins (CS:S) was released. This game uses the latest origin engine of the same genre as Half-Life 2, as well as the AI developed by Turtle Rock, which also led Turtle Rock to develop new content on its own.
One of the ideas comes from the gameplay that many CS players have tried: adjust the weapon settings of hostile AIs so that they can only use daggers for melee attacks, and only human players can use firearms normally, and kill a bloody path under the siege of AI.
The console command that allows the AI to use only the Dagger has been used all the way to CS:GO
This gameplay was already something that Turtle Rock played rotten in the process of developing robots, and finally evolved into the classic game "Road to Survival" in 2008, which was a four-player cooperative shooting zombie.
Road to Survival has a "Developer Commentary" mode where players will enter the actual map and listen to the developer's thoughts as they experience the game and combine specific game elements.
Mike Booth, the founder of Turtle Rock, explained it in this mode: "When we developed robots for Counter-Strike: Origins (CS:S), we found that some of us armed with automatic weapons to the teeth against 30 hostile dagger-wielding robots was very interesting. ”
Developer comment mode for Road to Survival 1
Following the idea of "working together against hordes of enemies," Turtle Rock spent months building a CS:S spin-off called Terror-Strike to show Valve President G Fat their initial idea. There is very little information about this Terror-Strike left on the Internet, only some screenshots with extremely low resolution and difficult to distinguish authenticity.
The female model from Terror-Strike is rumored on the Internet, and looks similar to the heroine of "Road to Survival", Zoe
Until January 6 this year, the development data of a batch of V Club games leaked to the Internet, and the source is temporarily unknown. This data can be browsed with the help of the Origin Engine's level editor, covering older games such as CS:CZ, CS:S, Team Fortress 2, and Half-Life 2, mostly with cuts that are not used in the actual game, such as maps and new game modes.
Source Youtube@Tyler McVicker
On the same day, a mod developer named Wolfcl0ck found a CS:S map called Zombie_City (Zombie City) from the leaked data.
While retaining the map's original design, Wolfcl0ck made it a complete module that works well in CS:S. To this end, he made some adjustments to the map, such as adding new materials, fixing unfinished textures in the map, and writing a map description himself.
Wolfcl0ck uploaded the mod along with the original map data to the mod website GameBanana for anyone to download freely. He also uploaded clips of his self-test to YouTube, in which he had fun with 30 AI "zombies" who can only attack with knives.
Zombie_City is a dim map of the city. Although there are no scene maps and some missing items such as furniture or vehicles, veteran players should recognize that some of the terrain structure design has many similarities to the "apartment" map in the first level of the No Mercy chapter of Survival 1.
For example, this big hole that can't come up after going down
Wolfcl0ck believes that this Zombie_City is likely the starting point for Survival Road, perhaps a version of the Terror-Strike concept that Turtle Rock showed V, or perhaps a derivative version that appeared in subsequent development. Youtube game broadcaster Tyler McVicker also agrees that the mod is the first prototype version of Road to Survival.
"A historic leak"
While this version doesn't yet have fearsome special infections and talkative survivors, a linear map coupled with the idea of cooperating to shoot melee enemies is enough to give a glimpse of Road to Survival.
Whether or not Turtle Rock successfully convinced G Fat with this map alone, in 2005, "Survival Road" was authorized and supported by V Society, and the development work went smoothly.
In 2008, Valve took over Turtle Rock, which had been in a partnership, and renamed it Valve South. After the release of Road to Survival 1, Valve and Valve South parted ways due to various internal problems, Valve still held the rights to Road to Survival, and Turtle Rock was rebuilt in December of the same year.
In fact, in the list of producers who developed Survival Road 1, only 7 people joined the rebuilt Turtle Rock. Even founder Booth stayed at Valve, contributing to the development of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), released in 2012, before leaving in 2013.
Employees who left Turtle Rock are shown with their names highlighted, and the source Youtube@Crowbcat
That said, in the new Turtle Rock studio, very few people know about the prototype of Terror-Strike, and perhaps few understand the pure joy of shooting AI that Booth is talking about. This may provide an explanation for their situation in the next dozen years: the two FPS they subsequently developed, one is the asymmetrical confrontation game "Evolution", and the other is "Blood Revenge", which is known as the spiritual sequel of "Road to Survival", neither of which has achieved as success as "Road to Survival".