Great Wall of China, it appeared to have been achieved at
the expense of its workers.
In a lesson the games industry has failed to learn from,
the crunch scandal killed Team Bondi’s reputation. In
2011, Kotaku published an article
titled ‘Nobody Wants to Work With
LA Noire’s Developers’. McNamara
never directed his intended follow-up,
another period action game, set in
1930s Shanghai. Yet he still works
with Rockstar, in a quieter capacity, at
Video Games Deluxe – the Sydney
developer responsible for LA Noire:
The VR Case Files, as well as an
upcoming ‘AAA open world VR game’.
The medium makes sense: a natural fit for a team with a
history of zooming in on the paraphernalia that litters a
cityscape. Let’s just hope other, less celebrated aspects of
its history don’t repeat themselves.
Jeremy PeelOne anonymous ex-Bondi source, speaking to
Brisbane-based journalist Andrew McMillen for
GamesIndustry.biz in 2011, claimed Rockstar was
incredibly hands-on – lending programmers, animators,
artists and creative direction to the project. “Rockstar’s
producers were increasingly influential over the last two
years of the game’s development, and overruled many of
the insane decisions made by Team Bondi management,”
the source said. “Eventually Team Bondi’s management
resented Rockstar for taking lots of creative control.”
Certainly, LA Noire turned out to be indicative of
Rockstar’s direction of travel after GTA IV – towards open
worlds that were increasingly nuanced, even
conversational, in tone.
Once LA Noire released, many former developers on
the project spoke out publicly. In an investigation
McMillen carried out for IGN, sources accused
management of treating any staff outside the inner circle
of Team Soho veterans as a disposable resource to be
burned through. Junior employees were pushed to work
long hours, sources alleged, leading to high turnover.
When IGN suggested around 100 staff had left during
development, McNamara said the estimate was actually
low. “Of the people we tried to build
the game with, most of them would’ve
never had any experience with this
kind of thing before,” said the studio
head. “And most of them would never
have made a game that had these
kinds of expectations.”
CHINESE DEMOCRACY
Crunch time, one artist claimed, went
on and on. With LA Noire’s release
date regularly shifting, the finish line danced just beyond
each staff member’s reach, pushing them to sprint for
longer and longer. “If you wanted to do a nine-to-five job,
you’d be in another business,” McNamara countered. LA
Noire may have been a work of art, but much like the
THE CRUNCH
SCANDAL KILLED
TEAM BONDI’S
REPUTATIO NLA Noire is really a
game about Aaron
Staton’s eyebrows.ABOVE: LA Noire
encourages a
methodical
commitment to
procedure.NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT