L.A Noire released to the console world earlier this year (and we quite liked it in our review) and managed to capture the hearts and eyeballs of many gamers with its 1940s vibe, detective-styled gameplay and of course, mind-bogglingly impressive facial animations.
As most of you know, the road to release for L.A Noire was a rough one at best, with Sydney-based developers Team Bondi working on the game for 7 years, going from being a PS3 exclusive to a multi-platform game, even facing project cancellation before eventually jumping to completely new publishers and that’s only the less-messy side of things.
Team Bondi, is now gone.
The news came to light when SmartCompany from Australia was following up on rumors of Team Bondi’s assets and IPs being sold, only to find that when the contacted Team Bondi this morning “it was informed the company was no longer located there. It was also told that no person would be available to handle media enquiries going forwardâ€.
This of course, happening after the aforementioned issues with the game development, as well as claims after release from ex-employees that they were subjected to crazy working hours, heavy work pressure and even a group of people claiming to have done work on the game without even being credited.
One way or another, Team Bondi has been in trouble for most of its lifetime and it looks like those troubles are finally at an end. As for L.A Noire itself, the intellectual property is owned by Rockstar, which means that if they are in the mood for a sequel, it will not only happen, but Rockstar will probably do nothing less than put a great team on the task.
So it’s sad that Team Bondi are gone, but if you care more about the games than everything behind the scenes, then fear not, because Rockstar will probably break out an impressive sequel in the not too distant future.
Source: Smart Company via IGN
Last Updated: September 1, 2011
