Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years to Make? | Hacker News Reader

Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years to Make?

au.xbox360.ign.com

67 pointsnl29 comments

"Eleven agreed to speak on the record, under the condition of anonymity"

Minor nitpick as a former journalist - being on the record means not being anonymous, and being anonymous means being 'off the record' (the 'record' refers to your name, not your comments).

If you're really interested, there are kind of four loosely defined categories of sources: On the record (quote and name me), Off the record (quote me, but don't name me), Background (Don't quote me, but use this information to verify other research) and Deep Background (this will point you in the right direction, but you'll need to verify with multiple other sources). As I said - loosely defined, but on/off the record is pretty clear.

Interesting - was watching All the President's Men the other night and they used these terms - I was wondering about the distinction.

That doesn't match my understanding, and Wikipedia[1] agrees with what I thought (and this article implies):

"Unattributable" (aka anonymous): what is said can be reported but not attributed.

"Off-the-record": the information is provided to inform a decision or provide a confidential explanation, not for publication.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_sourcing#.22Speaking...

This was my understanding as well; "on the record" meant it could be reported while "off the record" meant it could not. But then I'd have to say that what Jacob says makes more sense.

Yeah, "loosely defined" is probably an understatement - key rule if you are ever interviewed and want some level of control is to ensure you and the journalist know the definition not just the phrase.

Another one that I discovered in my brief time in journalism was that the medical reports (stable, critical etc) you hear most often have no medical basis - they're used by the media, and many healthcare professionals (at least, in Aus 10 years ago) didn't much like them because of their vagueness.

If you want my working definition of those, you basically have two scales: condition (fine, minor, serious, critical, dead) and change (improving, stable, deteriorating). Combine the two and you have an excellent soundbite - "The driver is in a critical but stable condition".

When I worked at Sony we were told there is no such thing as off the record when you are talking to a journalist.

This is why I never, ever recommend a job in the games industry, especially for programmers, and will actively work to change people's minds who do want to make games professionally.

This isn't an exception, this type of horrendous behaviour is the norm. For an industry who's product is software, they're the worst at doing it in a sustainable and repeatedly successful way.

Find a non-games programming job, and do game development on your free time. Indy games is the way to go (just look at Minecraft), anything else is a souless meat grinder.

Valve recently has had a good reputation for treating developers well, too.

Well, unfortunately conditions like these are not confined to the games industry. Psycopaths in leadership positions can most likely be found in every industry. Perhaps it's more common in the games industry, though. Or perhaps it just gets more attention, I don't know.

Seems to be a lot of horror stories about the games industry. Doesn't anyone have any more pleasant stories to share?

I liked a portion of my time in the games industry, but I don't really have much good to say about the studio where I worked: It was horribly dysfunctional like most other games studios. The positive aspects are mostly rooted in that your coworkers tend to be really driven, creative individuals.

I know of a few particular studios with a reputation for having good work environments, but in general, the nature of the industry causes bad managers and directors to rise to the top because it's impossible to reliably connect bad results with bad decisions.

On the other hand, I know lots of people who still like their industry jobs. I think for them, putting up with dysfunctional management is okay because they get enough out of the job otherwise to make it a fair trade. It's also possible to diminish the destructive effects of the job if you're strong-willed and productive - crunch is a good example. It's possible to work in the industry without working crunch more than a few weeks in your entire career.

I know of a few particular studios with a reputation for having good work environments, Are you willing to share? It would be nice to have a list of non assholes to buy games from. Enough of these articles have come out about Rockstar that I have decided not to buy from them anymore.

Nothing wrong with being an indie game developer. The problem is with the culture in the corporate game houses, not something inherent to game development.

The games industry is bad, but Brendan is not the norm.

>Find a non-games programming job, and do game development on your free time.

Does the startup model as touted here all day not apply so well to game development? I was under the impression that the indie smash hits like braid were generally made by small startups?

A lot of it probably depends on how much art you need I guess. If you can get away with putting abstract, algorithmically generated textures on everything, that's gonna shed a lot of man hours.

Algorithmically generated textures don't necessarily have to be abstract, and there are a number of workflow benefits to using them: http://www.werkkzeug.com/examples/texture_gallery

Unfortunately, these conditions are similar to those I hear about at many startups too. Games and startups are probably the two worst groups in this regard.

True, although my impression is that in most startups the folks putting in long hours actually own company stock and are hoping for a huge pay-off eventually.

This isn't an exception, this type of horrendous behaviour is the norm. For an industry who's product is software, they're the worst at doing it in a sustainable and repeatedly successful way.

It isn't just the games industry. Pretty much all of entertainment is like that. It is like that (and always will be, IMHO) because of the endless supply of labor. Lots of programmers want to work in the games industry, just like lots of actors want to be in the movie industry. This allows the bosses in those industries to treat their workers as disposable commodities.

I'm a programmer working on PS3 games and I am both well paid and never work over time. Never.

This year so far I have already doubled my salary in royalty checks. My company works 9-80s, so we get every other Friday off. And, if you work overtime, our management will get on your ass to stop it and go home.

So it is possible to have a normal career in games, but I guess I should count myself lucky.

I actually worked at Rockstar Games briefly during this period, although I wasn't involved with L.A. Noire. I would discuss with others why the games industry was run this way and what could be done about it. One friend's opinion was "look at successful games, they're all made that way, so 'bad' management must work better than 'good' management."

Thinking about it later, I figured that bad management just increased costs & time to market, and made the games buggier, but didn't fundamentally change who successful a game is. And video games are a very hit-or-miss business, where successes are such run away money makers, that a popular game can gross so much money as to cover a really inefficient development process. As long as the lead game designers had a really good sense for what a good game was.

"look at successful games, they're all made that way, so 'bad' management must work better than 'good' management."

That's silly logic, might as well as admit that since sweat shops make money then all companies should be run as sweat shops.

In my experience bad management succeeds despite itself, usually because of the workers who put up with it and push to succeed for their own reasons. In those cases the bad management does everything they can to take the credit for the success but blames everyone for the failures.

This is far more common in multiple industries than it should be. The main reason this happens, in my opinion, is most of the people you would want as managers (because they would be good) don't want to move into that position. They want to stay where they are since they like what they're doing. For example, moving a developer into a management position often means no more development for that person.

Not to say all management is bad, there are companies out there that do seem to get it. Valve seems to be the model we all should have in mind based on some recent stories I've read.

> In my experience bad management succeeds despite itself, usually because of the workers who put up with it and push to succeed for their own reasons

I sincerely wish, more managers would understand this instead of knocking each other on the shoulder.

Just because you manage to get something out of the door after all does not mean you are a good manager and it does NOT mean you are _NOT_ a bad manager.

What I don't understand is why employees working in such conditions don't unionise. I've asked around my circle of game development friends, some of whom had worked at Team Bondi, and none were able to give a coherent answer. It's as if they refuse to recognise joining a union as a viable choice. And we Australians are supposed to be a pretty union-friendly bunch.

This is an interesting moral debate - LA Noire was both a critical and monetary success AFAIK. Was this worth it? If you produce great art, do you have to worry about the "how"?

But if they had nurtured their talent so that they didn't have to re-train testers, programmers and designers every 12 months, they might have finished it in three-quarters of the time.

Exactly. It would also have made more profit if it had similar sales during the earlier release schedule.

Plus nurturing the talent means they can easily roll into the next project with little or no downtime, which makes that project cheaper to complete.

I'd argue this is not really true. Let's look at two notorious examples of "good" game dev companies, Valve and Blizzard (who I still consider good, even though I don't have any idea what's happening there since they got bought by Vivendi). Both take a lot of time to create games for example Episode 3, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, TF2.

So you can argue that both methods - being cruel to the employees and being very nurturing - deliver good games but take a lot of time.

ex-employees we spoke to, was McNamara's need to exert total control over what goes on in the studio. When asked whether that was true, he chuckled and asked "And is that a bad thing? I make video games. They're personal statements for me. I write 'em, I direct 'em, I put the technology together to make them. I go out to the world and say, 'Will you fund them?' So if you think that's obsessive: absolutely."

With over a hundred employees doing most or all of the work, you really have to love the massive ego that takes all of the credit.

This McNamara individual is trying to steal the "massive douchebag" achievement from Bobby Kotick. I'd say he's on the right track.

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