LA Noire - What Happened?

[Music] [Applause] [Music] salutations fellow gumshoes and welcome to another rip-roarin rootin'-tootin good time episode of what happened the show where we dig deep to uncover every filthy little scandal in the entertainment world so you better whip out your magnifying glasses and notebooks for this one because today's lurid tale of sin and sacrifice is the infamous behind-the-scenes story of rock star and team bond dies la noir a story I like to call the machinations of malicious MacNamara the years 2002 Sony Computer Entertainment has just published The Getaway a GTA clone smattered with dry British wit that was really subtle about its cinematic influences [Music] it was a co-production between SCE London and team Soho who were also based in London it released 2 million reviews and while not poor by any stretch it was lost in the deluge of all the GTA clones hitting all the store shelves in all of the early aughts enter one Brendan McNamara senior member of Team Soho and the director of the getaway who had but a handful of smaller projects under his belt then no one's ever heard of and before you say you do know you don't upon the lukewarm reception for the getaway mr. McNamara felt for some reason this would be a launching pad for the next step of his career so he left team so how unchecked all the way to the land of Hugh Jackman's deadly everythings and the pain bush good ol Australia he was also an effect returning to his old stomping grounds as he originally hailed from the land down under and wanted to open his own studio there he dubbed it Team Bondi and it was called such because it was named after Bondi Beach in Sydney Thank You instant hotel it officially opened in 2003 with just a handful of employees that McNamara had hand poached from Team Soho and they immediately got to work kinda very quickly two things happened one a deal was struck was Sony to publish bond dies first title and to McNamara opened a secondary studio depth analysis to research facial motion capture technology which would be integral for what Bondi was working on so you can clearly see the man was nothing if not ambitious you know who was also ambitious Nobunaga the year was now 2005 bond dies game was officially unveiled as LA noire n-- was slated as an exclusive for the PlayStation 3 however the team had only just received dev kits for the cutting-edge console so those first three years of development amounted to coding and designing in the dark making assumptions on how powerful the final Hardware would be statements from former members of Team Bondi which will be referencing a lot described this phase of development as directionless but exciting but also a bit frustrating oh the frustration hasn't started yet not long after this official announcement of ps3 exclusivity Sony Computer Entertainment became the pullout kings and suddenly decided there would be no longer publishing in LA noire si McNamara was betting a lot on that facial capture technology and the budget was ballooning because of it not only that but he also proposed that all the major characters who portrayed by Hollywood actors swell in the costs even further Sony felt all this investment and newfangled technology from the future wasn't worth the risk if LA noire failed thus they dropped it from the release schedule like a newborn koala now details around this time frame are a bit hazy but Eleanor's 47 Packard wasn't stalled out on the freeway for long as Rockstar Games wrote up in their shiny mercedes-benz and towed it off the hot Australian asphalt let's not also forget this wasn't the first time the publisher had saved what seemed like a trouble IP and turned it into an absolute blockbuster as nothing compares to the faded chapter of the worst business decisions of all time when Capcom gave up the rights to the Red Dead Eye P losing a potential billion-dollar franchise in the process after the publisher switched the first video footage of le noir to surface out of the La Brea Tar Pits was a 2006 CGI trailer that gave an eye hear what the player could expect in tone and atmosphere a hard-boiled post-world War two open-world game where you'd play as a detective trying to navigate the muck of la seedy underbelly at the time Rockstar would only confirm that the game was now in development for next-gen systems and played quali about that former ps3 exclusivity this coyness was maintained for several years for some reason now that the game had been properly set up with a new publisher who had experience with sandbox environments ironic since the getaway was a competitor to GTA it was time for work to swing into full gear but the thing about le noir and more specifically Team Bondi is that they only ever seem to operate in one gear which just so happened to be the slowest for though is not in the note despite the detective thriller being well reviewed in publications highlighted some exciting new technology and even going on to be a sales success it also represents one of the worst examples of developmental hell ever covered here and what happened most of the inside information from here on out comes from various staff members of Team Bondi known as the Bondi 11 a group of former employees that banded together to speak up about the unfathomable working conditions at the Sydney based studio in 2011 as a follow up to a list of credits that were not included into la noir an IGN article was published that finally gave these employees a proper voice as well as letting their former boss mr. McNamara respond to the many many allegations against him and his business practices most employees described McNamara as a bully one of the angriest people in the world and someone who always wanted things done their way his behavior was deemed so stress inducing there was one of the main factors that caused dozens of team members to quit Team Bondi sometimes only after a few weeks many of the staff corroborate this saying it's one thing for him to be angry behind closed doors but it was incredibly common for him to scream and whoever was pissing him off in the middle of the office it was falling apart and things got violent yikes so what did McNamara have to say about all this he maintained that get into verbal arguments were simply a part of trying to get things done am i passionate about making the game absolutely do you think I'm going to voice my opinion absolutely but I don't think that's verbal abuse yes it is he elaborates I can go to anyone I want it's my game I can go to anyone I wanted my team and say I want it changed I've been doing it for a long time and it seems to have worked so far for me now not only is screaming employees in public kind of like incredibly unprofessional it demonstrates a pattern as to why LA noire was such a nightmare to work on in most Western development studios a singular director and who answers to no one and micromanages everything is very rare and also not good an excellent example of this being Georgie boy in the Technicolor nukem of the Dukes the fourth traditionally triple a Western games are designed by committee a mix of producers team leads etc yes there is usually a director or even several but the point is is that everyone keeps each other and check but not a team bond i McNamara had absolute control and his team leads would fight him on absolutely nothing oftentimes he would demand unreasonable things from individual employees such as programmers or artists with an unrealistic deadlines or something that's not even within their skill set you better give us something quick we're gonna make this hard on you when said employees would then bring this up to their lead they would simply shrug and be like yeah he's passionate and then and then just go back to their work during the entirety of the seven years of LA Noirs development it was estimated that 100 different people joined and then left the company before the completion of the game and if you're wondering that's not great this cycle continued for two more years with Team Bondi making local Ozzy slugs jealous of their glacial pace things finally started to progress at a better clip in 2008 once Rock starts and a few producers over to Australia braving the drop bears and didgeridoos to try and write to this expensive leaky ship they were well aware the production problems plaguing Team Bondi and felt since they were publishing the title McNamara would listen to these new transplants which thankfully he did lots of former staff members cited these producers as the reason why the game finally started taking form but there's one other fire that Rockstar still had to put out however and that was the incredibly dismal employee retention while speaking to McNamara about his hands-on approach might have been the more long-term solution they put a band-aid on a bullet hole and provided additional artists programmers and testers from other rock star own studios to fill the gaps that were popping up every single week to try in carry the load now even with all these injections of fresh bodies the team were still bleeding Talent but fortunately or unfortunately Australia had lots of university programs that taught game design so the bulk of new hires at Bondi were fresh out of college looking for their big break they weren't the only ones looking however because Bondi was looking to take advantage of this because the HR department established a new position for those young doe-eyed game lovers dubbed Graduate juniors as it would provide an excuse to pay low wages while promising a more permanent role within the company upon future performance reviews many didn't even last this long a shared sentiment between almost all former employees of the LA noire team mostly all the Aussie hires is that they felt like second-class citizens again in the IGN expose one of them explained further we were looked at as a disposable resource basically if you weren't in the inner circle basically a clubhouse of former sohow members you are just a resource to be burned through their attitude is it's a privilege to work for us and if you can't hack it you should leave I heard one of the upper echelon say pretty much that I thought it was disgusting I don't understand how they can't see that maintaining talent would act be good for them now McNamara's micromanaging madness aside there was another reason why progress was so slow in LA noire and that was an additional trickle-down effect from that low employee retention rate it always takes some time for any new team member to get up to speed with the development the tools the engine just everything so whenever a new hire joined up they we need weeks to acclimatize flowing the work down even further a particular programmer who had worked on the game recalls this problem vividly I inherited all the stuff they worked on and of course once that happens I'm quite unproductive for like a month trying to figure out which ways up this happened to me three or four times I ended up inheriting four people's stuff now remember those rocks are producers they were slack shot when they realized this one programmer was doing the work of four others I was like yeah tell me about it man but when I left I handed those four things on to somebody else and then they hired new people too and it just kept going if they maintain their talent that operate a lot more efficiently and it wouldn't have taken so long so with an unreasonable egomaniac running roughshod over the team the pathetic levels of employee retention a bloated dictionary sized script multiple Hollywood actors doing expensive facial capture scans LA noire behind closed doors was a calamity waiting to happen however Rockstar couldn't just pull the plug as they had sunk by some reports over 50 million dollars into the development already and even more when taking marketing into account so it's soldiered on until late 2009 a good four years after they had agreed to publish multiple milestone deliveries have been missed by this point and to catch up on all the monumental amount of work left to do upper management did what upper management does when they realized everything was screwed up they called in a problem-solver if you will are what happened viewers will know this problem solver well it's none other than the super dependable always effective and one-of-a-kind mr. crudd sure it looks scary look this might crunch up your confidence oh but not the nice normal American mr. crunch no no this was the foul-mouthed aggressive and cruel Australian hard-ass mr. crunch now apparently this phase of crunch lasted from 2009 all the way to release so that's almost two solid years of overtime and weekends just let that sink in higher ups and McNamara of course kept this unbelievable situation going by stringing along its staff as a former artist at Bondi confirms even if you left at 7:30 p.m. you'd get evil eyes the crunch was ongoing it just kept on shifting management would say oh it'll finish once we meet this deadline but the deadline kept moving to game companies just think that crunch can solve poor scheduling or bad design decisions made early on in a project another colleague cited his time at Team Bondi as the most miserable of his life I left because of stress and working conditions mainly but the trigger was this I received a reprimand for conduct and punctuality for being 15 minutes late to work I arrived at 9:15 a.m. despite the fact I had only left work around 3:15 a.m. the previous night and paid for my own taxi home I never would have thought you could put a sweatshop in the Sydney CBD local crime boss Brendan McNamara also chimed in on crunch culture people don't work any longer hours than I do I don't turn up at 9 a.m. and go home at 5 p.m. and then go to the beach I'm here at the same hours as everyone else's we're making stuff that's never been made before if you wanted to do a nine-to-five job you'd be in another business or you could you know schedule your milestones better and not drive your employees to the edge of insanity and exhaustion but there's another grocer slimy your lair to all this crunching that might be the most shocking of all Team Bondi apparently stiffed almost everyone on the overtime hours they clocked in on LA noire no overtime was officially paid in the three years and three months that I worked at Team Bondi a former artist admits apparently staff contracts were muddled with a lot of wordage that implied that all official overtime hours would only be paid for three months after the game's completion not like you know during it if you left the company for any reason you wouldn't get what was due I suppose this clause was added to keep staff members at Team Bondi but [ __ ] that didn't really work did it McNamara as you can imagine refutes this there was a bonus scheme for working evenings and people got a month off for that and people who worked weekends got paid for it we brought in a weekend working scheme specifically for that don't you play with cheque or cash but contractually we don't have to do that part of the thing is is that we pay over the odds and it says in their contract that they need to do extra time I've done 20 years of not getting paid for doing that kind of stuff I don't begrudge it I get the opportunity to make things in my business you don't look a gift horse in the mouth the situation gets very muddy as several former employees claimed there was no bonus scheme in place that McNamara was twisting the truth during the IGN interview regardless we are now limping weakly into 2010 where Rockstar finally confirmed the LA noire would release in May of 2011 for the ps3 and the Xbox 360 with a PC port following a few months later so now is a good time to talk about one of the main aspects of the game that was left to the wayside one crucial element that was a casualty of the revolving door of talent at Team Bondi the open-world of Los Angeles while the game featured a meticulously recreated version of LA from the 40s there's nothing too actually you know doing it it's merely used as window dressing while you engage in long vehicle bound sessions with your partner a couple blocks north to Central Station so what do we tell the wife play it by the book there's no stiff yet so let's see how it plays out you often just feel like you're driving through a large life like Museum rather than a bustling metropolis now why is this well we barely had any animators for such a long time it was crazy people have mentioned how the open world in LA noire is wasted because the world is so boring the reason was because no animators wanted to work at Team Bondi there was no lead animator from January 2008 until the end of the game and for large parts of production we only had one animator working on gameplay animations and the others were doing the cinematic and facial ones this meant that there was no way to add life to the world it's a perfect example of why staff retention is so important but it was ignored by the leads a team Bondi and the game suffered for it to make this even simpler there were only two forms of animation the amazing facial motion capture and everything else and that everything else was mostly done by one person this explains the awkward disconnect between the fluid expressions on people's faces and the Steph mannequin like bumbling z' of their bodies we are now in launch week of May 2011 and Rockstar did their damnedest to market the [ __ ] out of la noir with long gameplay videos and pre-order exclusives reviews were fairly high and while criticisms were made against the unexcited open-world a ho-hum action gameplay and some technical hiccups the general consensus was favorable during its first month on shelves that managed to move just under 1 million copies across both versions but would eventually go on to sell 5 million altogether which while strong was barely enough to cover the massive budget furthermore 5 million was a drop in the bucket compared to other Rockstar successes with GTA 4 shifting 25 million copies and Red Dead Redemption 15 million just a few years earlier despite this encouraging success Rockstar however could see no benefit to working with Banda in the future and decided to cut all ties with them after such a long and painful development cycle well such a reputation I'm not gonna be able to hold on me any longer that's a mere four months after their first and only release Team Bondi shut down as they were unable to procure any other contracts from other publishers as reports about the terrible studio culture and working conditions sealed their fate even with everything crumbling around him Brendan McNamara had hopes that another project had and the works would get picked up which were then quickly dashed now while not much was known about this new title the one thing that was was enough for most people to just steer clear of it [ __ ] of the Orient was going to be another cinematic adventure but failed to find any sort of funding until it was picked up in a liquidation sale by one Kennedy Miller Mitchell a film production company that was co-founded by George Miller of Mad Max Fame this didn't surprisingly go anywhere there were rumors that Warner Brothers publishing had showed some interest in it but again nothing official was ever fully stated and the project just simply vanished after that Rockstar nari made a peep about LA noire terms of it continuing despite representatives claimed it remained an important pillar for their studio that silence ended in 2017 however where much noise was suddenly made over the misadventures of one Cole Phelps upgraded versions of le noir were released for the ps4 Xbox one and switch featuring upgraded textures camera angles and all the DLC with the port being handled by virtuous now what's interesting is that LA noire the VR Case Files also came out at the tail end in 2017 and well essentially just a first-person VR mod of several cases from the original title was developed by video games deluxe the new studio founded by Brandon Matt mara now usually here what happened I always look forward to telling you that the not very nice person is no longer working within the video games industry but this doesn't seem to be the case this time video games deluxe was searching for positions to fill up until about six months ago on LinkedIn and things have remained quiet ever since cuz yeah I bet it's not the easiest thing in the world to convince Aussie game developers to jump back into the [ __ ] pit once again it's also unclear whether Rockstar has any more tangible plans for LA noire outside of ports as it does have a definite appeal the music atmosphere and core ideas are loaded with potential it's just the original game was so mismanaged that it just soured the whole premise so after all this hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime the seven-year long development cycle the damaged lives and mental states of all the employees would McNamara do anything differently well when asked by IGN he thoughtfully replied I think we'd think twice about working in Sydney there's not much government assistance compared to Canada or the u.s. the expectation is also slightly weird here that you can do this stuff without killing yourself well you can't whether it's in London or New York or wherever you're competing against the best people in the world at what they do and you just have to be prepared to do what you have to in order to compete against those people Wow Brendan so so that's your only regret there's nothing else you feel you could have done better hon nothing at all you know what I believe you I mean I can't imagine why a man of your stature would have any sort of ragazza you know I guess if you're aware of any other fantabulous failures of the video game or a movie variety jot some notes down the comments below or sleuth your way to the dark alleys of the flophouse via P patreon to officially vote on the next sub we tackle here and what happened see you next time kids and don't work for McNamara [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 990,191

Rating: 4.9055972 out of 5

Keywords: LA Noire, Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto, Team Bondi, Video Game Disasters, Red Dead Redemption, Cole Phelps, Video Game Documentaries, Matt McMuscles, Wha Happun

Id: DN-Hv3pnVz0

Length: 25min 2sec (1502 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I actually really liked this game. It's heavily flawed in several areas, but it's so unique and really delivered on that Private Investigator feel. I knew it had severe development issues and horrible working conditions as this video describes, so that definitely sticks with me. I don't know why they felt the need to make it open-world because you literally only use it to go from point A to point B, and it was fairly tedious to get around in.

Assuming Rockstar still has the license I'd still like to see a sequel under competent management. My dream scenario for this game would be that there's a string of murders, you have a list of suspects, and at some point you arrest a suspect. If you were "right" then the murders stop happening, but if you're wrong then more people end up getting murdered and you have to deal with the fact that you locked up an innocent man, and have to continue that mission. Rinse and repeat. In the original game if you pick the wrong man it's simply game over, so when you restart you know not to pick that guy. Lame.

[u/TheSmithySmith]

The game was amazing to me but that B.S. ending kept it away from universal legendary status. I really wish we could get a definitive cut of the game fixing all its problems and turning the 8/10 game it is to the nearly 10/10 game it could be, but that’s sadly very unlikely considering we just got a remaster that changed absolutely nothing.

[u/uuuuno]

The Truth, Doubt, Lie system is what totally put me off, the system is confusing and the feedback loop is very dissatisfying.

[u/Jetsup]

Posting because I had no idea McNamara was such a horrible project lead. It seems like he is exactly the type of veteran jaded developer that is holding the industry back.

[u/AHSfutbol]

It feels a bit weird to say Capcom selling the rights to Red Dead was a terrible business decision. I don’t think the IP would’ve reached its current sales or value If it would’ve stayed under Capcom. It seems better to sell off an IP that they probably had no interest developing for.

Also it’s a bit unfair to compare a new IP’s sales, regardless of the marketing push, to something like GTAIV.

[u/[deleted]]

I never actually finished the game, I think I got right up to the end, saw a spoiler on the ending, said "nah" and moved on to something else. I enjoyed the ride up to that point, though. I wouldn't mind a remake or a sequel, maybe come up with something a little more intuitive for the interview system.

[u/drachengeist]

It shouldn’t have been an open world game. They could have invested much more time in creating stories in a linear game fashion, but instead they stretched themselves thin with the perfect recreation of 1940’s LA and the amazing motion capture. Something had to suffer and it shows.