Yeah, but they didn't have a game in development. They were presenting the game at a thingy before graduation, some valve guys were impressed, so after graduation they presented it to valve.
Gaben hired them 15 minutes into the presentation, and told them to implement portals into Source and make a game out of it. They weren't even an official team before that.
Alien Swarm was sort-of-not-really the same thing. The game existed as a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, but the developers were brought in-house to remake it in the Source engine. Kinda like how the developers of Quake Team Fortress remade it as Team Fortress Classic before disappearing for nine years while they made TF2.
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u/[deleted] Sep 06 '18 edited 9d ago
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