L.A. Noire Message Board older than one year ago
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"When we originally wrote the game the questions you asked were coax, force and lie. It was actually force because it was a more aggressive answer. That's the way we recorded it," McNamara explained at the Bradford Animation Festival, reports Eurogamer. "But when the game came out it was truth, doubt or lie. Everyone always says Aaron on the second question is a psycho. So that's not his fault."
McNamara also feels the reason some players felt the characters were dead from the neck down was because they were so lively in the face. He believes that players got used to seeing the facial detail and started getting picky about other stuff.
"It's a subtle thing, but once you attune to that level of realism then you start looking for the other things," he said. "And we had some criticism from people saying people were a bit stiff in their clothes and from the way they were done. But they were only stiff in comparison to real life."
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The bonus cases stacked atop your desk/disc include "The Nicholson Electroplating," "The Consul's Car," "Reefer Madness," "The Naked City" and "A Slip of the Tongue." They cover the arson, vice and traffic beats, and are offered alongside The Badge Pursuit Challenge and all unlockable outfits and weapons.
There's also a new prologue that explains why Cole Phelps transforms into Sergeant Frank Drebin every time he gets behind the wheel of a car.
(Or is there? Truth, doubt, lie, etc.)
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The real kicker is that nearly $150K is still owed to Depth Analysis, Team Bondi studio boss Brendan McNamara's firm that created the MotionScan facial animation tech, unquestionably a major factor that helped the game stand out.
Hold up, we take it back... the real kicker is that $54,427.01 is still owed to Bondi's accountants.
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What to say about Rockstar? They’ve made me gnash my teeth in anguish this week by stating, to nobody’s surprise, that Red Dead Redemption is unlikely to grace my PC, your PC or anyone else’s PC. But they are giving us LA Noire. They finally got round to releasing Grand Theft Auto IV but there were technical issues and beyond them it needed a monstrously powerful computer to fully capture its criminal charms. And then they went and annoyed parts of the substantial modding community by releasing a patch which, some claimed, was designed to cripple non-vanilla versions of the game. What to say about Rockstar?
(more…)
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Although LA Noire was an unquestionable hit for publisher Rockstar, becoming the "fastest-selling new video game IP ever in the UK," the game was on a separate narrative track from the internal drama going on at Team Bondi. Seven years of development took its toll on the staff and company.
In time, the truth will shake out about what went wrong at Team Bondi, in a year that should have established the studio as a force ending with its demise. For those who only care about the future of LA Noire ... don't you worry, IP holder Take-Two Interactive (parent company of Rockstar) isn't about to let a new series -- that shipped 4 million copies -- just disappear.
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We sent Agent Smee to study the case of the L.A. Noire port to PC. This is the detailed report he sent back. Having studied its contents, we have no reason to suspect foul play.
The notebook I carry around everywhere is an unreadable mess. Written in handwriting so poor I can barely sometimes decipher my own words, it’s a collection of incomprehensible interview notes, indecipherable idle thoughts, scrawled doodles, contact details inevitably copied down incorrectly and shopping lists written over one another in different coloured ink before being scribbled out. It’s a nightmare, is what I’m saying, so playing LA Noire in the presence of the hard-nosed Detective Cole Phelps turns out to be some kind of lurid personal fantasy. His notebook, you see, is beautiful. Meticulous, organised, copperplate writing, lifelike portraits and intricate still life pencil compositions, the perfect tool of organised life. It’s not exactly often I find myself jealous of fictional videogame characters, but boy howdy do I want to be able to organise a notebook as well as Phelps.
(more…)
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Release dates and system specifications: least entertaining of all the PC game-related facts. Oh well, it’s worth stating, given this is Rockstar’s first PC game in a while. Ambitious but oddball detective puzzle/action saga LA Noire is coming to PC as ‘the Complete Collection, which includes all the DLC release to date. In terms of PC-specific features, all we’re promised is “increased resolution and graphical detail along with keyboard remapping and gamepad functionality.” Plus NVIDIA 4D Vision support, but whatever.
When’s it due and what kind of PC will it need? I’m totally going to make you click Read The Rest Of This Entry to find out. SUCKER.(more…)
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The "Complete Edition" was handled by Rockstar Leeds (Liberty City Stories), and adds 3D support, includes all the DLC missions, and asks for a lot in terms of recommended specifications. Head past the break for the full rundown.
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Some sad news, I’m afraid. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has announced that Team Bondi, developers of LA Noire, have gone into administration. It’s not long since stories of the troubled and prolonged development hit the airwaves and Rockstar had already stated they would not publish the team’s next title. Rockstar do own the rights to LA Noire though and the PC version is in the hands of their Leeds studio. This shouldn’t change anything on that front, though we shall keep an eye on the situation. As for Team Bondi, judging from what conditions were apparently like in the studio, it’s amazing to see the ambition that still made it into LA Noire. Sad times indeed for those hardworking people who may undeservedly lose their jobs.
The PC version of the game (handled by Rockstar Leeds) is arriving later this year. We’re taking it a look at it very soon.
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A company in turmoil can be placed into administration to help facilitate payments to creditors, possibly through sale of assets or parts of the company. It's not known how exactly administration will proceed with Team Bondi, but earlier reports suggested that company assets were acquired by Kennedy Miller Mitchell (KMM), an Australian production company thought to be working on a Mad Max game. Staff at Team Bondi were reportedly offered jobs at KMM if they did not take severance pay.
If you're looking for further developments regarding the L.A. Noire franchise, it will be have to be at Rockstar -- the publisher owns the rights to what is likely to be the last game from Team Bondi as we knew it.
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You may have noticed that games that appear on the PlayStation Network, but not on the Xbox Live Marketplace, don't seem to ever come Microsoft's way down the road. The opposite has often been true, with numerous Xbox 360 and Xbox Live Arcade releases eventually making their way to Sony's disc-and-download-based platforms months after the fact. And yet Microsoft seemingly never gets these post-exclusive releases on the other side of the coin.
Apparently, that's because they don't want them.
Speaking to Eurogamer at Gamescom, Xbox Europe head Chris Lewis stated that Microsoft's policy is that titles must ship simultaneously on Xbox 360 or XBLA alongside other platforms, or be exclusive to Microsoft for some period of time. Otherwise, the company may simply refuse to allow the content on its console.
"We're a little biased, so obviously we're going to look to protect our own space as best we can and get exclusivity," he said. "Whilst I can't be specific about the terms and conditions, you can be very confident we seek to maximise our own advantage to ensure the playing field is even, and certainly plays to our advantage wherever possible."Eurogamer obtained a copy of Microsoft's Content Submission and Release Policy, which states the following regarding parity and/or exclusivity:
Titles for Xbox 360 must ship at least simultaneously with other video game platform, and must have at least feature and content parity on-disc with the other video game platform versions in all regions where the title is available. If these conditions are not met, Microsoft reserves the right to not allow the content to be released on Xbox 360.The "parity on-disc" portion of that statement does explain away how Sony was able to secure certain launch exclusive content, such as the added bonus case for L.A. Noire, which came in the form of downloadable content. At the same time, it doesn't explain away how Warner Bros. was able to release Mortal Kombat, which featured an on-disc PS3-exclusive character in God of War lead Kratos, without drawing Microsoft's ire. While Kratos would never appear on any console not branded PlayStation, the fact that the Xbox 360 version had no equivalent bonus character seems to go against the wording of the policy. Perhaps feathers were rankled, and Microsoft simply allowed things to move forward given MK's stature and draw as a title.
This policy does also extend to digital titles as well. This may have something to do with why Sony's new PSN PLAY program, ostensibly an attempt at bringing to the table its own version of Microsoft's Summer of Arcade, features no exclusive titles save for Payday: The Heist, a Sony Online Entertainment developed title. Microsoft, for its part, requires a minimum of four weeks of platform exclusivity to include any title in the Summer of Arcade program.
Regardless of any evidence of apparent flexibility in the policy, Lewis made it clear that he sees no chance for change in the policy any time in the foreseeable future, and emphasized that Microsoft sees this policy as a way of ensuring things remain competitive between the various console platforms.
"But, honestly, and this is going to sound a bit contrived, we just want what our consumers want from us. We want to be where they want us to be. We want the quality bar of what they experience from us to continue to go up. I think it has to happen. Everybody's got to do that. If we want to continue to command healthy average selling prices, which we all do, that which we offer our consumers has got to keep getting better. Despite the fact it can be irksome to have such strong competition all the time, it actually does keep us on our toes. It's great for everyone, and it makes for a very healthy race to higher and higher levels of quality of game experiences."↕
GameStop also cited lower hardware sales and fewer games this quarter compared to last year, both of which the company said contributed to an overall lower quarter for store sales, down 9.1%. The retailer also reported diminished net sales of $30.9 million compared to $40.3 million in 2010.
LA Noire, NCAA Football 12, Infamous 2, Brink and Mortal Kombat were GameStop's top earners in the quarter, spanning the classic genres of shooters, sports games, fighters and whatever you'd call LA Noire. Crime drama genre? The "character actor did it" genre?
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Michael Pachter making headlines? Never!
Of course, now I've just added to the pile...but stay with me for a second.
The Wedbush Securities analyst has never been one to shy away from a bold statement. When a Pach Attack! viewer asked him about the reports of extended crunch development at L.A. Noire's Team Bondi and what it says about the rights of game creators, Pachter had no shortage of opinions on several topics--overtime, unions and more.
I'm not here to offer my own thoughts on Pachter's comments. Instead, I've plucked the statements that generated the most response elsewhere, and tried to prove, disprove or, at least, provide some context to them.
"I've never heard a developer say I don't work overtime and I don't work weekends. I do not think the game development process as having employees that qualify for overtime."
The concept of paid overtime is a contentious one, the argument in favor stemming from the industry's struggles with crunch, where a development team ends up working insane hours--nights, weekends--to finish a project. It's reported Team Bondi operated on crunch hours for more than a year to finish work on L.A. Noire.
Hourly employees can earn overtime pay, while salaried employees are not legally entitled to overtime.
"While compensation is certainly part of the equation, the fact is the problems extend well beyond compensation," said Brian Robbins, chair of the International Game Developers Association board of directors and founder of mobile developer Riptide Games. "At best, extended crunch becomes unproductive for the team, and in the worst cases causes physical and mental harm on the people involved."
The IGDA is a non-profit industry membership organization meant to connect developers with one another and to advocate for issues effecting the industry workforce. It is not a union, a subject we'll touch on a bit later.
The extended crunch time alleged by current and former Team Bondi employees is on the extreme end of the spectrum."Crunch and overtime in gaming is, as any experienced developer knows, a part of life in the games industry," added Haunted Temple Studios co-founder Jake Kazdal.
Kazdal is currently working on the strategy game Skulls of the Shogun, recently picked up by Microsoft for Xbox Live Arcade. He previously worked on Rez at United Game Artists and the cancelled Steven Spielberg project LMNO at Electronic Arts, among other projects. He's well on the way to the home stretch of Skulls of the Shogun now.
"It is expected, but the idea that people aren't 'entitled' to overtime pay is simply ignorant," argued Kazdal. "People sacrifice time with their children and spouses, miss important events, completely exhaust themselves for the sake of the project, why the hell shouldn't they be compensated?"
Pachter wasn't saying developers shouldn't be compensated at all, but that it shouldn't come through overtime.
"If a game is good, and LA Noire was really good, there will be a profit pool and there will be bonuses. If you're good, and you hit it big, you make a ton of money."
L.A. Noire might have a profit pool. It might not. It actually doesn't matter. According to the latest annual salary survey published in the April issue of Game Developer, 77% of developers polled--sans business and legal--received income on top of their standard salary.
Profit pools definitely exist, but their are risks associate with them--and they're not common.31% earned a bonus after a project or title shipped, 14% received royalties in addition to their salary and 16% engaged in profit sharing. Some developers had a mix of these, including stock options and regular annual bonuses.
All told, the average additional compensation was $12,712.
"I've been in the industry for 15+ years, worked on lots of cool projects, but not once have I ever received any money from a profit pool," said Kazdal. "Rez was a great game, but that doesn't automatically mean we made a ton of cash and that cash bled out as far as the artists and programmers. To suggest that all good games make the developers rich is just ridiculous. That is reserved for the mega-titles, which my eclectic career has not put in my path."
Kazdal does have friends who've benefited from a profit pool--but they worked on Gran Turismo.
Former Infinity Ward co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella had an ugly split from Activision last year, an impasse that's still to be resolved in a splashy lawsuit. Amongst other things, West and Zampella are suing Activision over more than $100 million in unpaid royalties. It's not chump change.
There are no guarantees with a profit pool, either as one anonymous developer who once participated in one told me.
Call of Duty? Gran Turismo? There's a distinct pattern with profit pools: very, very big games."Even if there is a profit pool, it's incredibly unlikely you'll see anything, let alone the whole amount," said the developer. "Most likely the threshold to go into the pool is too high to ever pay out. If it does pay out, the less reputable publishers will find ways to bend terms to reduce or cancel the payout. The payout is almost always staggered out over multiple years too, and they'll almost definitely only be tied to your employment, so if you leave before the payout finishes, you won't get the remaining royalties."
That final point--getting no money because you've left before payout finishes--is one of the egregious allegations in the Infinity Ward suit, in which Activision was allegedly locking developers into continuing to work at the studio in order to receive payouts for the previous game's royalties.
"We're talking about a games industry where the average compensation is well above $60,000 and often above $100,000 a year. I just don't think people who make $100,000 a year need a whole lot of protection because they have to work overtime."
Pachter brings up two points. First, the average salary of a game developer. We can pull applicable data from the same Game Developer salary survey, which proves Pachter partially right.
- Programmers: $85,733
- Artists and Animators: $71,354
- Game Designers: $70,223
- Producers: $88,544
- Audio Professionals: $68,088
- QA Testers: $49,009
The overall average? $72,158, definitely above $60,000. "Often" above $100,000? Not necessarily. Based on the survey, earning at least, close to or more than $100,000 is definitely possible in every department except QA, but you need to be at the top position within your field (i.e. technical director vs. programmer) and have more than six years of experience.
Just working at a big studio doesn't guarantee a massive salary. Experience makes all the difference.Lastly, there's the concept of organizing into unions, in order to collectively force publishers to treat developers more fairly.
It's a polarizing topic that, like all these subjects, really deserves its own story to be fully explored.
That said, the results of the most recent IGDA "Quality of Life" survey presented at the Game Developers Conference last year suggested there is support for unionizing game developers, albeit support that's hardly across the board.
Of 2,506 surveyed, 35% were for unions, 31% sided against unions and 34% either didn't have an opinion or preferred not to say. More than one-third isn't a number to scoff at, but there are significant challenges to actual unionization.
"Ignoring whether or not it makes sense to have a union for game developers, the reality is it would be very difficult to create one," said Robbins. "The vast geographic diversity of game development, makes for a significant challenge to unionizing, even before you start looking at the realities for what unionization would mean for developers, and trying to see if a significant number of developers support the idea."
Pachter later better clarified his position through an editorial on Industry Gamers. He reiterated that working conditions at Team Bondi seemed indefensible (a point he made in the original video, to be fair), but there was little to suggest that these employees deserved overtime or that unions would have a natural way of integrating into the video game industry.
Either way, Pachter's just the latest to weigh in on a controversial topic that's swirled for years. He won't be the last, either.
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A few former Team Bondi employees -- the same ones who reported terrible work conditions under McNamara -- work at Dr. D and found it unsettling that McNamara was touring the offices, the source said. Apparently Miller is a fan of Team Bondi's work and is sympathetic to McNamara's reputation as a strict taskmaster, according to one employee at Dr. D: "The word is going 'round that Team Bondi is being folded into KMM studios; Team Bondi is pretty much doomed after the scandal and can't find any new supporters, so by doing this they can hide their name."
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With L.A. Noire's brain-bustingly successful existence as an adventure game, and with Deus Ex: Human Revolution bringing cyberpunk back into the limelight, Kojima was asked whether or not he thinks the world is ready for another Snatcher. "I would love to do something like Snatcher," he said, "but I do not have the time or the means to do so. But if anyone else would like to develop it, I would love it."
It's sad to hear that the series' progenitor won't be returning to Neo Kobe City anytime soon, but at least die-hard Snatcher fans (Snatchies, we call ourselves) can look forward to a radio drama based on the game. What do you think? Should Snatcher be handed off to another developer, or left as-is?View Poll
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Taking a similar stance as studio boss Brendan McNamara, Heironymus says that while employees worked long hours, they weren't being asked to do anything that their superiors weren't also doing. Heironymus also downplayed the 100-hour weeks that some staffers have claimed, saying that he would have discouraged any members of his team attempting to work that much.
However, Heironymus isn't claiming innocence for Team Bondi's management. He writes, "no-one at Team Bondi is under the illusion that crunching is a good way to work and we're actively working to learn from our mistakes for our next project."
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"I know, I know. I'll be labelled as 'Brendan McNamara's sock puppet' or worse," begins Dave Heironymous' post on GamaSutra today, "You'll just have to take my word that I'm doing this because I enjoy working at Team Bondi and don't want to see it destroyed by anonymous ex-employees."
Team Bondi's Dave Heironymous says the story of the studio's work practices has been a one-sided argument thus far.Heironymous is one of Team Bondi's original employees, having joined the company straight out of University as a junior programmer, and eventually worked his way up to a position of team management. He spent the last four years working as L.A. Noire's lead gameplay programmer, and self-identifies as one of the "management goon squad" referred to by the ex-employees of the studio who have decried the working conditions at the studio in recent weeks. Heironymous had much to say on the subject of Team Bondi's working practices, and his own experiences with the alleged crunch hours that have drawn so much ire.
In Heironymous' mind, longer working hours were an inevitability of the development process. Indeed, most developers will tell you that crunching is simply a fact of making a game, but the issue many have taken the studio to task for regards falsified claims of crunch hour needs, pertaining to perpetually missed release dates and milestones. However, Heironymous says that no one at the studio worked any harder than management themselves did, and that compensation for additional hours was routinely given.
Recognising that working on the weekend was inevitable, Team Bondi put in place a scheme to (generously) reward employees for their weekend days spent at work. Additionally, in the last 6 months of the project a scheme was put in place to reward employees for staying back late on weeknights, and this resulted in myself and most of my team getting an additional 4 weeks of leave upon completion of L.A. Noire, on top of the weekend working payment.Towards the end of the project I was probably working (on average) around 65 hours per week. Apart from a few isolated cases (various demo builds) this was the highest my regular hours ever got to, and at no time did I ever work 100 hours per week. If you think about it, that's 14 hours per day, 7 days per week, which is huge. I can't say that no-one ever worked 100 hours per week, but those sorts of hours were not encouraged. In fact, if someone on my team was working that hard I would have done my best to stop them.I never (and in my experience, neither did any of the other managers) expected anything from my team that I didn't expect of myself. The management team at Team Bondi was not ensconced in an Ivory Tower working normal hours while everyone else crunched. Brendan himself worked very long hours and few of us here in the studio are aware of how grueling the DA and motion capture shoot in LA was.In regards to the accusing parties who have repeatedly commented (albeit anonymously) on the dire working conditions at the studio, Heironymous challenged their motivation for coming after the company.
If the motivation were to see improvement in the working conditions at Team Bondi, then I'm all for it. I have a wife and friends who didn't see very much of me during the latter stages of L.A. Noire, and I'm lucky my wife was so understanding. All of the management and staff at Team Bondi want to improve our processes so we can make even better games in a decent timeframe, without burning people out along the way. However, some of these comments in recent stories seem to go beyond that. Some ex-employees who left the company years ago want to see Team Bondi destroyed. They want to see 35 game developers out of a job. That seems to me to be a less laudable motivation.At no point in Heironymous' missive does he lay down any theories as to why former employees would be banding together to ruin the studios' reputation, nor does he address the crediting issues that left a hundred former employees without published credit for their work on L.A. Noire (most recently covered by our own Patrick Klepek here). However, Heironymous does concede that over the course of the game's lengthy development cycle, some mistakes were likely made, and simply asks for the chance to improve on things for the future.
Saying all of this, no-one at Team Bondi is under the illusion that crunching is a good way to work and we're actively working to learn from our mistakes for our next project. The people at Team Bondi are great to work with and I'm confident that we can make Team Bondi a leading game studio on the international stage.Please think about that when you talk about boycotting L.A. Noire or about how heinous Team Bondi is. There is a team of dedicated game developers here in Sydney that look forward to learning from their mistakes, improving on their successes and taking on the world again next time around.↕
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Una Cruickshank worked on L.A. Noire, but you wouldn't know it.
Even if you were patient enough to sit through the rolling credits after finishing the game, you wouldn't see her name. Cruickshank was one of the many people who passed in and out of the protracted L.A. Noire development process that began way back in 2004.
L.A. Noire was a PlayStation 3 exclusive to be published by Sony at one point, remember?
The only reason Cruickshank's listed on Moby Games right now as having contributed is due to a petition, located at www.lanoirecredits.com, organized by 149 developers who claim to have been left off the credits for the joint production between Rockstar Games and Team Bondi.
Cruickshank agreed to talk to me because the issue of proper crediting is not exclusive to L.A. Noire or Rockstar Games, though the company has been publicly criticized for similar problems in the past.
It's an industry-wide problem, one which has no clear solution and continues to weigh heavily over the community.
After graduating from college, Cruickshank started at Rockstar North in Edinburgh, Scotland where all of the major Grand Theft Auto releases have been crafted. She had humble beginnings at the studio, who was developing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas at the time. She started as a temporary contractor, then offered a permanent position as a development assistant after the game shipped in October 2004 on PlayStation 2.
"After about a year I decided I was bored with being a development assistant, and that what I really wanted to be was a scriptwriter," she told me recently. "James Worrall, the lead writer on the GTA series, very kindly gave me some dialogue to work on and with that I was off: I've been writing in one field or another ever since."
During that time, she worked on both San Andreas and the PSP spin-off Liberty City Stories. She was from New Zealand, though, using a work visa. When that expired and she was unable to procure a new one, she left Rockstar North and applied at Team Bondi, a studio she'd never heard of at the time. Strangely enough, she was leaving Rockstar Games to end up working with Rockstar Games again on the company's adopted project, L.A. Noire, as a script assistant.
Cruickshank wasn't there when L.A. Noire's development started or finished, and when she joined the studio, she never heard of any official policy about crediting. What happens to anyone who works on the game but leaves before completion?
"It was understood among the developers that if you did not see the project through to completion you would lose your credit," she said. "I knew this because I had worked in game development before and had seen it happen: how the younger developers with no experience worked it out I have no idea. It was simply accepted as fact that if you quit, got fired or were made redundant you would have nothing to show for your work. In the course of a seven year development cycle, that happened to an awful lot of people, some of whom put years of work into a project they loved. The day I resigned, I knew that one of the things I was giving up was my credit, and it made the decision even more difficult."
If you look up the credits for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you'll find Cruickshank's name.Ultimately, Cruickshank wasn't credited when L.A. Noire shipped in May. She left Team Bondi in January 2008.
Companies are not required to credit everyone who touched a project because there is not an industry-wide forced standard. The International Game Developers Association has established the closest thing we have by actually creating a standardization template for developers to use, but it's all optional.
"The L.A. Noire issue highlights the dichotomy relating to credits," said Brian Robbins, chair of the IGDA board of directors and founder of mobile developer Riptide Games. "Some developers and studio heads see a credit as a 'badge.' They see credits as an award ribbon that you get for crossing the finish line or the pat on the back for sticking through long hours and poor working conditions. The people that feel this way might consider giving credit to an artist that worked on the game two years previous and left for greener pastures after a year almost insulting."
Rockstar Games has been knocked for credits in the past, and it's the last incident that prompted the IGDA to create a Credits Standards Committee to write credits guidelines in the first place.
It was not the only thing the Manhunt series became known for, but long before L.A. Noire, Manhunt 2's release caused controversy for a number of developers left off the credits list.Jurie Horneman was employed at the now-defunct Rockstar Vienna, working as a senior project manager on Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for Xbox and a producer on Manhunt 2. He was credited for the former but not the latter, and made headlines back in 2007 for publishing a list with a much more complete list of developers who'd contributed to Manhunt 2.
"I would have been surprised if they had credited us for Manhunt 2 and the other AAA next-gen project we had in development," Horneman told me. "But I kind of saw it coming so I had the blog post with the full credits prepared. The list was made with help from and in cooperation with other ex-Rockstar Vienna people. What I didn't know is that Hannes Seifert, one of the two former managing directors of Rockstar Vienna, was involved with the IGDA credits effort. He knew I was preparing the blog post, so the fact that the IGDA revealed their credits standard at the same time was no accident, even if I didn't know about it at the time."
There wasn't a company-wide policy regarding credits at Rockstar Games, as far as Horneman ever knew. As a studio, however, Rockstar Vienna took it upon themselves to keep a credits document at the start of a project and keep it updated as people cycled through the company. Obviously, the list wasn't used.
"From looking at L.A. Noire and Manhunt 2, it seems they put everyone who was there at the end into the credits, and left off anyone who was not," said Horneman.
And while Rockstar Games has taken multiple hits regarding credits, Mythic Entertainment was under fire in 2008, after the launch of Warhammer Online. It was a similar situation, with anyone still working at Mythic Entertainment when the MMO launched listed in the lengthy credits. Whereas Rockstar Games has mostly ignored both situations, Mythic Entertainment actually built an online database to properly credit anyone who'd been a part of putting together Warhammer Online.
While these situations are unfortunate and uncomfortable, the IGDA applauds the result.
"While creating the standard has helped a few developers," said Robbins, "it’s the public outcry that emerges every time high profile games are accused of omitting people from the credits that really has impact."
The ambitious world in L.A. Noire took hundreds of developers nearly a decade to create.If Brendan McNamara had left L.A. Noire halfway through development, there would be headlines (in fact, that's happened anyway). No one noticed when Cruickshank left because she wasn't put in front of the press. Without a public record of her involvement, it's not surprising no one called foul when the game shipped without her name.
"For many of us, the fear of not being credited was a large part of what kept us working on L.A. Noire through a long and sometimes difficult development cycle," she said. "It wasn't that we didn't love and believe in the game, but this was a monumental project which demanded a lot from its staff over a very long time."
"A number of Team Bondi's developers were hired directly out of university or TAFE [technical and further education institutions in Australia]" she continued. "L.A. Noire was their first real job, and a few years into the project some began to feel that they literally could not leave--if they did, they would be in their mid-twenties or early thirties with what amounted to a blank resume. Fair and consistent crediting rules would have allowed those people to make their own decisions about their employment without fearing that they had wasted years of their working lives."
Horneman shared some of the same concerns, but said this wouldn't be the case for every individual.
"I have blank spots in my resume, it's impossible to tell how much it has affected my career," he said. "If I see someone with a 'AAA' resume, I am not surprised when there are a lot gaps and cancelled projects on there. And you can always find someone who worked with the person and get feedback that way. So I am perhaps a bit more sanguine than most about the value of credits. I can say I've been making games for over 20 years, which probably helps open doors."
Therein lies the rub for some developers.
With the rise of mobile and social games, the IGDA estimates the number of developers who go uncredited on projects has only risen in recent years. Without credit, a new programmer or artist just breaking in could be left with nothing to show for it.
In the movie industry, labor unions like the Writers Guild of America fight for the rights of its members, performing duties such as enforcing credits. Unions don't exist in video games. It's not to say unions are the only way to make credits more important in the eyes of developers and publishers, but unions are one way to collectively force an industry towards change.
"To force an industry to value credits and understand their worth will require employees to insist on receiving them," said Robbins. "As long as we 'understand' and 'accept' that crediting is only a participation award for the finishers, the industry will continue to treat employees that way."
Those who worked on Warhammer Online but left before ship were added to an online database.Games are still in the early stages of maturing as a medium. The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision defending the First Amendment rights of games is one signal of that, albeit an important one. As games become better known as creative works worth acknowledging, the demand for those who craft them to, in turn, receive acknowledgement for their work may grow.
"In game development, it is not unusual to be in a dark position where everything seems lost, and then, through a heroic effort involving overtime, suddenly everything works and is done on time, sort of," said Horneman. "From personal experience I can tell you that going through a phase like that is an incredibly bonding experience. And it then becomes very natural to believe that anyone who wasn't there doesn't know what it was like and maybe doesn't deserve to be credited. And, also, that you can solve any problem by crunching--hey, it worked last time! It takes maturity to realize that this a short term solution, and that you cannot build a medium to long term strategy based on that."
If the IGDA's prediction that more and more developers are being left off credits is true, we need more developers to be brave enough to come forward, and gaming advocates need to champion them on.
"The biggest enemy to an industry crediting standard is apathy," concluded Robbins.
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