L.A. Noire wasn’t just one of those overnight success stores that some games aspire to be, though it was another extremely successful Rockstar title. The game spent about seven years in the bowels of development limbo by Team Bondi, and details of this time period are starting to emerge from the murky waters.
IGN Australia contacted now-former Team Bondi employees, 11 of them to be exact, as well as Brendan McNamara, the boss himself, and got some gritty details about the development process. There were many reports of inhumane working conditions, rapid turnover, and 60-hour work weeks following the development of L.A. Noire. One employee stated that, “No overtime was officially paid in the three years and three months that I worked at Team Bondi.” McNamara responded to the issue, saying that Team Bondi had set the overtime pay in place, though “contractually, we don’t have to do that.”
One other anonymous employee described McNamara as a “24/7 corpse grinder with perpetual crunch and weekend overtime.” This statement didn’t see a response from McNamara, leaving it in the air. Much more was stated about the company, though this is just a bit of the tribulations that were suffered during the rough patches in L.A. Noire’s development. For the full interview, head to the post here.