THE LONG GOODBYE
How TEAM BONDI built LA Noire on the back of The Getaway
Look at the paper map of London folded into the front of The Getaway’s DVD box, and you’ll be struck by two things. First, just how incredibly faithful it is. And second, the uneven street density. Where most of the city is a condensed network of main roads that take you round the back of Buckhingham Palace and across Hyde Park, that changes as you cruise through Covent Garden into Soho—the game world becoming a close crosshatch of squares and side streets. It’s the natural focus of a team that lived and worked in the area—Team Soho, as they were then. The same core staff that would end up founding Team Bondi, and making LA Noire.
The Getaway has a lot in common with the game Team Soho’s key members would go on to create. For one thing, it took a long time to come together—first conceptualized during the PS1 era, and releasing just after Vice City. Unusually for the time, it shone a spotlight on its non-celebrity actors—using photo images of the cast in promotion, recreating their faces and performances in cutscenes, and putting their names front and center of its credit sequence.
Although it took place in an open city, The Getaway didn’t adopt the free-roaming structure that GTA was just then popularizing. Instead, its London was the backdrop to a bleak riff on Guy Ritchie’s capers—the linear story of a helpless tough “running all over town” committing bucket-list crimes on behalf of the aging gang boss who had kidnapped his child.
RHYMING GANG
Once the player arrived at the scene of their next shootout, Team Soho would whip out the magnifying glass, drawing interiors in intense detail. Witness the
Reptilian Gallery, home to an art exhibit filled with dozens of unique paintings and sculptures, not to mention information boards, leaflet stands, and a receptionist who asks the protagonist if she can be of any assistance (“Nah I don’t fink you can babe. I’m just browsin’, awight?”).
It might be thought of as unnecessary set dressing for a mission that quickly descends into clunky cover shooting, and concludes with a car chase at breakneck speed. But you can’t argue with the sense of place and authenticity that results from it. The Getaway is that rare game enhanced by its product placement; where Grand Theft Auto leaned into parody, this competitor offered the uncanny realness of passing a Pizza Hut in a Lexus—the car brands fitting for a studio that first found its wheels with the PS1’s Porsche Challenge.
After critical acclaim and commercial success, the core Getaway team followed writer-director Brendan McNamara to Sydney, where they set up Team Bondi— initially with the continued backing of Sony. Swapping out Snatch for LA Confidential, they envisioned another open world city, this time taking in Hollywood and the backyard of the Black Dahlia killer. Again, the blocks and blocks of meticulously remembered urban land were purely peripheral, left out of focus in favor of the main event: Small-scale crime scenes which players would investigate, turning over discarded coffee cups with their hands, rummaging through handbags and bins in search of clues. Again, the team sought to rival cinema, investing in cutting-edge performance capture tech—asking players to analyse the expressions of actors in close-up, in order to determine whether suspects were telling the truth.
HEAVY PRICE
It remains an irresistible premise, but it was a costly one. In fact, LA Noire became the most expensive game project in Australian history. Before long, Sony backed out—and in a twist of irony, Team Bondi found a partner in Rockstar, which picked up the financial baton and carried it through to the bitter end.
One anonymous ex-Bondi source, speaking to Brisbane-based journalist Andrew McMillen for GamesIndustry.biz in 2011, claimed Rockstar was incredibly hands-on—lending programmers, animators, artists, and creative direction to the project. “Rockstar’s producers were increasingly influential over the last two years of the game’s development, and overruled many of the insane decisions made by Team Bondi management,” the source said. “Eventually Team Bondi’s management resented Rockstar for taking lots of creative control.” Certainly, LA Noire turned out to be indicative of Rockstar’s direction of travel after GTA IV— towards open worlds that were increasingly nuanced, even conversational, in tone.
Once LA Noire released, many former developers on the project spoke out publicly. In an investigation McMillen carried out for IGN, sources accused management of treating any staff outside the inner circle of Team Soho veterans as a disposable resource to be burned through. Junior employees were pushed to work long hours, sources alleged, leading to high turnover. When IGN suggested around 100 staff had left during development, McNamara said the estimate was actually low. “Of the people we tried to build the game with, most of them would’ve never had any experience with this kind of thing before,” said the studio head. “And most of them would never have made a game that had these kinds of expectations.”
CHINESE DEMOCRACY
Crunch time, one artist claimed, went on and on. With LA Noire’s release date regularly shifting, the finish line danced just beyond each staff member’s reach, pushing them to sprint for longer and longer. “If you wanted to do a nine-to-five job, you’d be in another business,” McNamara countered. LA Noire may have been a work of art, but much like the
Great Wall of China, it appeared to have been achieved at the expense of its workers.
In a lesson the games industry has failed to learn from, the crunch scandal killed Team Bondi’s reputation. In 2011, Kotaku published an article titled ‘Nobody Wants to Work With LA Noire’s Developers’. McNamara never directed his intended follow-up, another period action game, set in 1930s Shanghai. Yet he still works with Rockstar, in a quieter capacity, at Video Games Deluxe—the Sydney developer responsible for LA Noire: The VR Case Files, as well as an upcoming ‘AAA open world VR game’. The medium makes sense: a natural fit for a team with a history of zooming in on the paraphernalia that litters a cityscape. Let’s just hope other, less celebrated aspects of its history don’t repeat themselves.
Jeremy Peel
THE CRUNCH SCANDAL KILLED TEAM BONDI’S REPUTATION