Team Bondi

» see teambondi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Brendan McNamara set up Team Bondi in Sydney in 2003, after directing The Getaway at Team Soho in London and deciding to make the next one at home. The studio announced a game in July 2005 and released it in May 2011. That is the whole corporate history. One announcement, one release, and then an administrator.

L.A. Noire was built around a piece of technology called MotionScan: an actor sat inside a rig of thirty-two cameras and the performance was captured as video from every angle rather than as dots on a face. It meant the central mechanic of the game could be watching a suspect's face and deciding whether they were lying to you. Sony funded the early years and then Rockstar Games took the publishing. It shipped on 17 May 2011, sold in the millions, and became the first game ever selected for the Tribeca Film Festival.

Within a month of release the other story arrived. Former staff put up a site listing more than a hundred and thirty people who had worked on the game and did not appear in its credits. Andrew McMillen published an account at IGN built from eleven anonymous employees describing years of twelve-hour days. The chairman of the IGDA said publicly that if the descriptions were accurate the conditions were unacceptable. Rockstar, according to leaked internal email, decided it would not publish whatever came next.

The company went into voluntary administration on 31 August 2011 and into liquidation on 5 October, owing around 1.4 million Australian dollars across more than forty creditors. Most of that was wages, bonuses and entitlements owed to the people who had made the thing. Thirty-three of the staff who did make it into the credits were owed a combined 1,074,283 dollars and 28 cents.

I write software for a living and I have never worked on anything that ran seven years, but I recognize the shape of a schedule that does. A project with one deliverable and nothing shipping in between has no mechanism for being told it is wrong until the end, so every estimate inside it is a guess nobody can check. The people who talked to reporters in 2011 were not describing a cruel decision taken on some particular afternoon. They were describing a plan that only balanced if the last year of it was free.

~ the dossier ~

~ the seven years ~

MotionScan was genuinely new and genuinely expensive. Thirty-two cameras produce an enormous amount of data per second of performance, the capture stage had lighting that could not be changed afterward, and the results only work on a face, which is why the technology stayed in this one game and its makers' hands. The rig belonged to Depth Analysis, a sister company under the same film-industry owner who would later take Team Bondi's assets.

Seven years of development on a single title is not automatically a disaster; it is what several famous games cost. What it needs is a publisher willing to keep the lights on and a plan for the year after release. Team Bondi had the first for most of the run and never got the second, and a studio with one finished product and no next contract is finished on the day the product ships, regardless of how it reviews.

~ the credits ~

The credits row is the part of this story that changed the industry slightly. Games have no equivalent of a film union's rules about who gets named, and studios have historically applied a policy of crediting only staff who were still employed at the end, or who lasted some number of months. For a project running seven years that policy quietly erases most of the people who worked on it.

This matters in a way that sounds petty and is not. In games, credits are the resume. A programmer with no shipped title on paper is a programmer who has been working for years on nothing, as far as the next employer can tell. The site the former employees built was not asking for money. It was asking to be able to prove they had been there.

~ how it actually ended ~

Kennedy Miller Mitchell, the Sydney film company behind Mad Max, took the assets and the intellectual property for the script McNamara was writing next, and moved a number of the staff into a games subsidiary to build it. That project, Whore of the Orient, was worked on for several years and never came out. McNamara founded Video Games Deluxe in 2013 and made the VR version of L.A. Noire that arrived in 2017.

L.A. Noire itself has been remastered and re-released and is easy to buy right now on hardware that did not exist when it was made. That is the ordinary ending for a good game. The unusual part is the gap between how well the product did and how completely the company failed, five months apart, and the fact that the money the liquidators were chasing was owed to the people in the credits and to a hundred and thirty more who were not.

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