Former Team Bondi boss, Brendan McNamara, working on next big game

Although what's left of Team Bondi has been absorbed into KMM Games in Sydney, former Team Bondi boss and the very outspoken, Brendan McNamara, is working on the next big budget console title. McNamara was in London for the 2011 Bradford Animation Festival for a talk titled "Bringing Humanity To Games" where he discussed the facial technology behind Team Bondi's L.A Noire. Eurogamer took this opportunity for a frank interview with McNamara on his former studio, the well publicised accusations surrounding the development of L.A Noire, and the rocky relationship with publisher, Rockstar Games.

In the Eurogamer interview, McNamara blames the closure of Team Bondi on the combination of a few things, the most serious of which includes not signing a new project, a year-long process which the studio had no time to do while they were busily finishing L.A Noire. The bad P.R caused by the work condition accusations by anonymous ex-employees also highly affected the studio. Regarding the reports of the gruelling 110 hour per week sweatshop work conditions at Team Bondi, McNamara believes those stories were exaggerated and not deserving of the huge backlash that Team Bondi's management received from the press, considering the marathon crunchtimes he's seen in other games studios...

(McNamara) Nobody stayed up for three days making L.A. Noire. I don't even think there was an all-nighter on it...

I'm not justifying crunch for video games. If there's a smarter way of doing it we should all do it a smarter way. But the backlash to us compared to the backlash to other people was pretty remarkable, I thought. I don't know what you thought.

One of the things that McNamara did find annoying, however, wasn't the fact that the ex-employees decided to speak out against their boss, but that they chose to do it anonymously rather than confronting him personally...

(McNamara) The way I look at it now is that people can say whatever they like, and they will. So I might as well just wear it. That's where it's at...

People are entitled to their opinion. I'm perfectly happy for people to say they don't like working with me or I'm a bully or I'm this or whatever. The part that annoys me is people do it anonymously. I'd rather they just ring me up and tell me to f**k off, right? Or people want to print your company emails on the internet. I'm like, what is that about? That could happen to any company in the business.

McNamara revealed to Eurogamer during the interview that he is working as a free agent on a new big console title which he is currently talking to a few interested parties about. He describes the game revolving around "one of the great untold stories of the twentieth century" and will be ready to make a formal announcement within the next few weeks.

For the full interview, head on over to Eurogamer.