The relationship between top publisher/devloper Rockstar, and L.A. Noire developer Team Bondi has gone down south as of recent, but the latter firm’s boss still finds room to praise Rockstar for taking a chance on L.A. Noire, after Sony’d ditched the title because it had gone way over budget.
It was in a recent interview with CVG Team Bondi head Brendan McNamara spoke those words, adding the decision paid off for both teams.
“Rockstar, they’ve been brave enough to take this huge risk and do a completely different type of game – and so the thing so far is just to see whether people will appreciate it and buy into it and like it, because hand on heart, everyone will talk to you in the rest of the games business and say ‘wow, what a huge risk Rockstar took with that one,’ but now it’s paying off,” he said.
“No other publishing company in the world would take the risk. You saw E3. I didn’t, but when you see all the videos that were out there, there are some amazing games but there’s a lot of ‘me too’ and a lot of more of the same, and Rockstar continually push the envelope.
I think it’s one of the reasons why people have faith in them because they don’t just rehash things every year, and they spend enough time – GTA is the classic example – you could say that somebody could keep a game like that going for 10-years or longer and just do five versions. Everyone else would try and crank one every year. They’re happy to do film noir, they’re happy to Western – all of those kind of things.
LA Noire was a text adventure for many years as we were trying to debug the script and all the game logic. The script has a lot of logic in it like, ‘did I meet this person? Did I pick up this thing? Did I ask this question out of order?’ There’s a lot of testing of that and to have that faith through that process and say this text adventure is eventually going to turn into what it turned into – no other company would do that.
That’s the thing, with something as long as this, nobody wants to lose their shirt over it. Rockstar are brave enough to take the risk but nobody wants to lose a shirt over it because then you don’t work again.”
The game recently came out on PS3 and Xbox 360, and is top-rated.
thats why everyone loves R*, there the only company out there that tries to stray away from the norm and do something different.
look at sony, they had this all to themselves and they chickened out!
morons, would of made them a shelling!!!!!!!
Well it sold great because of its multiplatform status so…..
it would of still done well if it was ps3 exclusive.
would of sold a few systems too, i mean its not everyday you get a game like this!