GAME · 2011
L.A. Noire
- Developer
- Team Bondi
- Platforms
- PlayStation 3, Microsoft Windows
30 archived facts 3 topics 1 source Last reviewed Sep 2026
All facts (30)
- #001
L.A. Noire began development in 2004, shortly after Brendan McNamara founded the six-person studio Team Bondi in mid-2003 with former Team Soho developers.
- #002
During L.A. Noire's development, the team visited Rockstar's New York headquarters every few months to show progress, and studios owned by Rockstar Games worldwide assisted the work.
- #003
L.A. Noire ran on a proprietary engine built by Team Bondi rather than Rockstar's Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, and it used Havok for physics.
- #004
MotionScan, the facial capture technology central to L.A. Noire's interrogation mechanic, was developed by Depth Analysis, a sister company to Team Bondi founded under McNamara's leadership; it recorded actors at 1,000 frames per second using 32 cameras to capture expressions from every angle.
- #005
MotionScan's precise requirements forced extensive preparation for L.A. Noire, including hairstyling for performers, and Rockstar was doubtful about the process, leading the team to consider falling back on the technique used in other Rockstar games such as Red Dead Redemption (2010).
- #006
L.A. Noire's development team spent the first year-and-a-half researching Los Angeles using newspapers and magazines, organising research trips and capturing photographs.
- #007
During L.A. Noire's development, 180,000 photographs were available as resources and more than 1,000 newspapers were used for research.
- #008
McNamara's long-standing interest in 1940s Los Angeles, including a screensaver of the first freeway being built there while he worked on The Getaway, and the lighting improvements from PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3, led him to explore the film noir genre in L.A. Noire.
- #009
For L.A. Noire, the development team based building interiors on real Los Angeles structures and studied the Barclay Hotel extensively to recreate it accurately in the game.
- #010
L.A. Noire's team took artistic licence in recreating Los Angeles, including showing the Babylon film set from Intolerance, which had been destroyed before the 1940s, as a way to celebrate its history.
- #011
During development of L.A. Noire, the team produced more than 140 production bibles that served as style guides covering floorplans, dressing, signs, graphics, lighting and reference material.
- #012
Several L.A. Noire cases drew on real crimes reported by the city's media at the time, such as "The Red Lipstick Murder," which is based on the unsolved February 1947 murder of Jeanne French.
- #013
L.A. Noire contains more than twenty hours of voice work, with over 400 actors performing for the game.
- #014
Casting for L.A. Noire was handled by Schiff/Audino through secretive auditions, resulting in several actors shared with the television show Mad Men, which used the same casting firm.
- #015
Actor Harrington described the MotionScan process used on L.A. Noire as somewhat restricting, while comparing the game's motion capture performance to live acting.
- #016
McNamara approached Noble during L.A. Noire's early development, and Noble visited the studio regularly before being offered a role and starting performance work in early 2010.
- #017
Some L.A. Noire characters draw on real people, including Mickey Cohen, while others are inspired figures; Captain Donnelly is loosely based on LAPD Captain Jack Donahue and on McNamara's father.
- #018
L.A. Noire features an original score composed by Andrew Hale and Simon Hale, recorded at Abbey Road Studios and inspired by orchestral scores from 1940s films.
- #019
Rockstar engaged Woody Jackson, who had previously worked with the team on Red Dead Redemption's music, to assist with L.A. Noire; he re-orchestrated one theme and wrote much of the in-game music.
- #020
Andrew Hale described composing the L.A. Noire score as a flexible process focused on setting a mood, rather than a mechanical exercise written to match the time period.
- #021
L.A. Noire's in-game radio carries licensed music from artists including Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday, and the developers hired the Real Tuesday Weld to write three original vocal tracks performed by Claudia Brücken and sung in-game by Elsa.
- #022
After L.A. Noire's release, a group of former Team Bondi employees created a website called lanoirecredits.com listing more than 100 names that had been left out of or misrecorded in the game's official credits.
- #023
An anonymous Team Bondi employee said he was required to work 10–12 hours daily, weekends included, during work on L.A. Noire.
- #024
Several former Team Bondi staff described ongoing crunch during L.A. Noire's development, with one saying they sometimes worked 80 to 110 hours a week to hit milestones; some said overtime went unpaid, a claim McNamara denied.
- #025
After IGN published a report, the International Game Developers Association opened an investigation into Team Bondi to check the claims it contained.
- #026
Lead gameplay programmer David Heironymus and senior gameplay programmer Charles Lefebvre disputed the claims, saying crunch was regrettable but unavoidable and that they knew of no unpaid overtime or abusive conditions.
- #027
McNamara said Team Bondi had bettered its working conditions in the months following the game's release, including by bringing in flexitime.
- #028
In July 2011, confidential emails from L.A. Noire's development were leaked, along with additional comments from staff members who said the material highlighted a contentious relationship between Team Bondi and Rockstar.
- #029
An anonymous development team source told GamesIndustry.biz that Rockstar "saved the project" but that the relationship between Rockstar and Team Bondi was "badly damaged", making further collaborations unlikely.
- #030
The same anonymous source said Rockstar was frustrated with the direction at Team Bondi, whose management "resented Rockstar for taking lots of creative control"; Rockstar had once been keen on making Team Bondi something like "Rockstar Sydney" but came to see that as a terrible idea.
Sources & editorial notes
Sources for the entries on this page
- Wikipedia L.A. Noire — Wikipedia
Information from external sources is independently selected, consolidated and edited by Arka Evren. Sources are listed for verification and further reading. Encyclopedia text is used under its licence (CC BY-SA). How we work