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A Team Bondi programmer has disputed recent claims over working conditions during the production of LA Noire, stating that news coverage of the story has been exaggerated and “one-sided”.
Last month anonymous Team Bondi employees told IGN that they had been forced to work under “sweat shop” conditions, with working weeks sometimes jumping from the usual 60 hours to as much as 110 hours. But now, in a Gamasutra post entitled Team Bondi: My Side of the Story lead gameplay programmer Dan Heironymus has presented a different version of events:
“Towards the end of the project I was probably working (on average) around 65 hours per week,” said Heironymus. “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.”
Heironymus also added that Rockstar played a crucial role in keeping the game on track throughout its troubled development.
“While we were making L.A. Noire we’ve seen the game development community in Australia dwindle with the likes of Pandemic, Krome, Ratbag and Transmission closing their doors during our tenure. We could have gone the same way, and I’m sure we came close to being cancelled several times.
“Having Rockstar as the publisher of LA Noire was a blessing, because their focus is on developing extremely high quality games. Rockstar kept faith with LA Noire and Team Bondi throughout the hard times because they could see the game LA Noire would eventually become.”
The developer added that IGN never asked him for his side of the story. In fairness, all the accusations were given to Team Bondi chief Brendan McNamara, prior to the story’s publication.
“I know, I know. I’ll be labelled as ‘Brendan McNamara’s sock puppet’ or worse,” said Heironymus. “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.”
The most recent LA Noire DLC case, Reefer Madness, was released this week.
About the Author
L.A. Noire
- Platform(s): Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One
- Genre(s): Action, Adventure, Shooter, Third Person
