L.A. Noire

• 1. Introduction

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  L.A. Noire, a game from 2011 set in Los Angeles in 1947, became the first video game honoured as an official selection at the Tribeca Film Festival. Team Bondi developed it, and Rockstar Games published it. Players follow a young police officer named Cole Phelps as he climbs the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department, solving cases bureau by bureau. The game asks something unusual of its audience. It asks them to study a human face and decide whether the person behind it is telling the truth. How did a studio make digital faces that could carry that weight? How did a team rebuild a city that no longer exists? And why did the studio behind it close soon after the game reached shelves?

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• 2. The Interrogation Room

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  Thirty-two cameras surround the actor, and together they record at 1,000 frames per second. That rig is MotionScan, a technology developed by a company called Depth Analysis. Brendan McNamara led the founding of that sister company to Team Bondi. The cameras capture every angle of a performer's expression, which rebuilds a believable human face on screen. Interrogation depends on this, because the player must read a witness's reactions to judge whether the person is lying. The system was exacting. Performers needed careful preparation, right down to their hairstyling. Rockstar was doubtful about the process, and the team considered falling back on the technique used in Red Dead Redemption from 2010.

  In practice, the player questions a suspect or witness and hears a reply. Then comes a choice. The player can believe the answer, doubt it, or accuse the speaker of lying. An accusation must be backed by evidence. The in-game notebook lists the evidence, places and people in a case, and it is also where the player picks questions. When two suspects wait at the police station, the player decides whom to charge. A wrong choice lowers the case's end rating, a five-star scale built from investigation, interrogation and behaviour while driving.

  Help comes in the form of Intuition points. At a crime scene, one point can reveal the remaining clues. In an interrogation, it can remove one answer, or it can show the most popular answer among other players through the Rockstar Games Social Club. Progress raises the player's Rank, up to a maximum of 20. Each new rank earns outfits and hidden vehicles, and it also earns another Intuition point.

  Clue hunting has its own audible signal. Once the player has found every key clue at a scene, the investigation music concludes. The player can also switch the whole game to black and white, imitating film noir. Anyone who fails an action sequence three times may skip it and continue with the story. All of those faces needed a city around them, and the team set about building one from research.

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• 3. Rebuilding 1947

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  While working on The Getaway, Brendan McNamara kept a screensaver of the first freeway being built in Los Angeles. His interest in 1940s Los Angeles ran deep. He also felt that better lighting systems on the PlayStation 3, compared with the PlayStation 2, finally made the film noir genre possible for a game. He began with a 4-5-page outline, then read stories from the Los Angeles Public Library for inspiration.

  The team then spent the first year-and-a-half of development on research. They studied newspapers and magazines, organised research trips and took photographs. By the end, 180,000 photographs were available as resources, and over 1,000 newspapers had been used. Photographer Robert Spence had taken aerial photographs of the city, and the team modelled the open world from them. Those images shaped traffic patterns and public transport routes, and they showed where buildings stood and what condition they were in. The team also photographed Jay Leno's collection of vintage vehicles for reference.

  Interiors followed real buildings. The team studied the Barclay Hotel at length to recreate it accurately. Accuracy did not always win, however. The Babylon set from the film Intolerance had been destroyed before the 1940s, yet the team included it to celebrate its history. To keep everything consistent, they wrote over 140 production bibles. These style guides gathered floorplans, dressing, signs, graphics, lighting and reference material. Some cases grew from real crimes in the news of the day. The case called "The Red Lipstick Murder" is based on the unsolved murder of Jeanne French in February 1947.

  Some ideas never survived. Eleven cases across two desks, Bunko and Burglary, were cut because the team suspected they would not fit on one Blu-ray disc for the PlayStation 3. A version of the wanted system from Grand Theft Auto was also removed, since it felt out of character for Phelps. The Xbox 360 version eventually shipped on three discs, down from as many as six before compression.

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• 4. Phelps and the Syndicate

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  Cole Phelps is a decorated United States Marine Corps veteran from the Sixth Marines, and he starts the game as a patrol officer. His partner is Ralph Dunn, another new recruit. After a major murder case, Phelps moves up to the Traffic desk, then to Homicide. There he works with Rusty Galloway, a weary and cynical detective who often challenges his theories. The cases echo the Black Dahlia murder, and Phelps doubts that the arrested suspects are the real killers. He turns out to be right. He and Galloway find and kill the true murderer, but they cannot reveal his name because of his link to a powerful government official.

  The Vice bureau changes everything. Phelps traces military surplus morphine stolen from the ship that carried his old Marine unit home. Several former squadmates had stolen and sold it, and they were then assassinated on the orders of the gangster Mickey Cohen. Meanwhile Phelps begins an affair with Elsa Lichtmann, a German jazz singer. His new partner Roy Earle is sardonic and corrupt. Earle helps prominent figures in the city escape a prostitution scandal by exposing Phelps's adultery just before Phelps can draw a confession from Courtney Sheldon. In return, Earle gains a place in the Suburban Redevelopment Fund. Phelps's marriage ends, and he is demoted to the Arson desk.

  The Fund claimed to provide affordable housing for returning veterans. Phelps links a series of suspicious house fires to one of its housing developments. Earle warns him away from the Fund and its founder, the real estate magnate Leland Monroe. So Phelps turns to Jack Kelso, a former Marine with whom he shared an intense rivalry. Kelso, an investigator at California Fire and Life, finds that the development uses unsuitable building materials and that his boss, Curtis Benson, knowingly insures them. In some Arson cases, the player controls Kelso instead of Phelps.

  The scheme was a fraud on the Federal Government. Monroe planned to buy plots, build cheap houses and raise their value, knowing the government would later buy the land by eminent domain for a planned highway. The Fund's psychiatrist, Harlan Fontaine, used a patient to burn the homes of owners who refused to sell. That patient was Ira Hogeboom, a former flamethrower operator from the Sixth Marines. He had been left severely traumatised after burning out a cave of civilians on Phelps's orders. Eventually a fire he set killed four people. Sheldon, overcome with guilt, had given Fontaine the stolen morphine, believing it would go to medical facilities, and Fontaine later murdered him.

  Hogeboom kills Fontaine and kidnaps Elsa. Phelps and Kelso chase him into the Los Angeles River Tunnels. They rescue Elsa, and Kelso shoots Hogeboom to end his suffering. Then intense rainfall raises the water. Elsa and Kelso escape, but a violent current kills Phelps. At the funeral, Earle delivers a eulogy claiming Phelps was falsely accused and had exposed the corruption of Fontaine and Monroe. Elsa leaves in disgust. Herschel Biggs, Phelps's last partner, tells Kelso that the two men were never friends but were never enemies either. A closing flashback shows that Kelso had known about the stolen morphine and refused any part in distributing it.

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• 5. Voices and Music

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  More than 400 actors performed for L.A. Noire, and the game holds over twenty hours of voice work. The team hired Michael Uppendahl to direct them, because of his experience. Auditions were held in secret by the casting firm Schiff/Audino. That firm also cast the television show Mad Men, so several actors appear in both. Dan Houser, Rockstar's Vice President of Creativity, suggested Aaron Staton for Phelps. McNamara won him over by pitching the character, the world and the technology. Staton worked on the project for about 18 months. The full script ran to 2,200 pages, which he could not read in its entirety, so he received a 12-page outline of the story and of Phelps's history.

  Other performers found their own way in. Michael McGrady felt his introverted personality helped him connect to Galloway. Sean McGowan saw Bekowsky as a man who, once jealous of Phelps, came to treat him like a younger brother. Adam J. Harrington compared the capture work to live acting but called MotionScan "a little restricting". John Noble first met McNamara early in development and visited the studio regularly. He was later offered a role and began performing in early 2010. Some characters came from real life. Mickey Cohen was a real man, and Captain Donnelly is loosely based on both LAPD Captain Jack Donahue and McNamara's father.

  McNamara said the technology let players connect with characters in a way games had not managed before. He aimed "to go on a personal journey with characters". Switching the player from Phelps to Kelso, he explained, meant the player had to "go outside the realm of being a cop to bend the rules". He compared the ending to A Tale of Two Cities from 1859, where characters come "full circle" and "Phelps could do something for Kelso for once". Phelps's death was partly inspired by the ending of the film Chinatown from 1974. A gameplay sequence planned after the death was cut because it "never really worked".

  The sound of the game came from Andrew Hale and Simon Hale, who composed an original score recorded at Abbey Road Studios. They drew on orchestral scores from 1940s films. They wanted the music to feel accessible, so they avoided focusing only on swing or jazz. Andrew Hale described the work as "about setting a mood". Rockstar also brought in Woody Jackson, who had worked with the team on Red Dead Redemption. He re-orchestrated one theme and wrote much of the in-game music. A live orchestra made interactive music hard, since the player can hear the loop. Inspired by Bernard Herman and film noir, Jackson wrote original tracks in about a month.

  The in-game radio plays licensed songs from artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday. The Real Tuesday Weld wrote three original vocal tracks to suit the period. Claudia Brücken performed them, and Elsa sings them in the game.

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• 6. Delays and Re-releases

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  L.A. Noire was officially announced in 2005 as a PlayStation 3 title to be released by Sony. By September 2006 the publishing rights had passed to Rockstar Games, though no platforms were named. An early cinematic trailer followed in October 2006. In June 2007, Rockstar's parent company Take-Two Interactive listed the game for the 2008 fiscal year. Then came a string of delays. The release moved to the 2009 fiscal year, then to September 2010, then to the first half of 2011. Finally it settled on the 17th of May 2011 for North America and the 20th of May for Australia and Europe.

  The marketing built slowly. Game Informer gave the game its cover story in March 2010. The debut trailer arrived in November 2010, announcing PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions. A development video in December 2010 demonstrated MotionScan and featured interviews with the cast and developers. Rockstar ran a competition whose prize was a trip to Los Angeles for the Festival of Film Noir at the Grauman's Egyptian Theatre, plus a chance to play the game a month early.

  Rockstar also teamed with Mulholland Books for L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories, published on the 6th of June 2011. It gathered eight short stories by crime authors including Lawrence Block, Joe R. Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates, Francine Prose and Andrew Vachss. Jonathan Santlofer edited it, and the collection was finished in six weeks. Santlofer's first story was rejected because it spoiled part of the game's plot, so he rewrote it without spoilers.

  Rockstar sold extra cases through the "Rockstar Pass", one of the first season passes in video games. Five cases followed in 2011. They included "The Naked City", a Vice case inspired by a 1948 film, and "Nicholson Electroplating", an Arson case based on the O'Connor Plating Works disaster. L.A. Noire: The Complete Edition, with all the extra cases, reached Windows on the 8th of November 2011 in North America, and then consoles.

  In 2017 came a second wave. The studio Virtuos developed an enhanced version with finer textures and upgraded weather. It launched for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on the 14th of November 2017, and the Switch version added gyroscopic Joy-Con controls. Video Games Deluxe, a new studio founded by McNamara, built L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files, a set of seven cases for virtual reality. It reached the HTC Vive on the 15th of December 2017, Oculus Rift on the 4th of April 2018 and PlayStation VR on the 25th of September 2019.

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• 7. Critics and Sales

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  The Guardian's Steve Boxer called L.A. Noire a "breakthrough for games". Reviews were "generally favorable" according to the aggregator Metacritic. Critics praised the facial animation, the story, the characters, the performances, the music, the world design and the interrogations. Reactions to the shooting and driving were mixed. GameTrailers wrote that the game "sets a new standard for storytelling in video games". Many reviewers described Los Angeles itself as the "star" of the game, and several called the facial animation the best in any game.

  Not every part drew praise. Game Informer's Matt Helgeson called the interrogations "the most compelling aspect" of the game. Yet Eurogamer's Oli Welsh described the investigation work as "clunky" and "laborious", and Helgeson thought it felt "more like an Easter egg hunt than an actual investigation". Some reviewers found that the bodies did not match the faces, though others felt this added subtlety. The Windows version drew similar praise and complaints. GameSpot's Carolyn Petit called it the best version because of the extra cases, while others called it a bare-bones port.

  The later versions also earned positive reviews. Push Square's Sam Brooke judged the 2017 re-release "certainly worth its asking price", and critics split over the new graphics and Switch controls. For The VR Case Files, IGN's Dan Stapleton wrote that it felt "less like a port and more like something that was always meant to be played this way".

  The commercial results were strong. On the day of the North American release, Take-Two's shares closed up 7.75%, a three-year high. The game shipped four million units in its first month. In the United States it was the best-selling game of May 2011 with 899,000 copies, below an analyst's estimate of one million. It also topped the United Kingdom charts as the fastest-selling new intellectual property, with 58% of copies sold on Xbox 360 and 42% on PlayStation 3. Duke Nukem Forever pushed it to second place after three weeks. In Japan it sold over 71,000 copies in its first week. Almost five million copies had shipped by December 2011, and approximately 7.5 million by September 2017. McNamara had felt pressure because his earlier game The Getaway sold four million.

  Awards followed. At the British Academy Games Awards in March 2012, the game tied with Batman: Arkham City for the most nominations, eight, and won Original Music. The Game Audio Network Guild named it Music of the Year, and GameSpot gave it Best Atmosphere.

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• 8. Crunch and Closure

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  Shortly after release, a group of former Team Bondi employees launched a website called lanoirecredits.com. It listed more than 100 names that were missing from the official credits or listed incorrectly. An anonymous employee said he was asked to work 10-12 hours every day, weekends included. IGN then published a report in which anonymous team members described the studio's management, staff turnover and working hours. Some claimed McNamara had been controlling and verbally abusive. One said he sometimes worked between 80 and 110 hours per week to meet milestones. Some former staff said they were not paid for overtime, and McNamara repudiated that claim.

  The International Game Developers Association launched an investigation to verify the claims. Lead gameplay programmer David Heironymus and senior gameplay programmer Charles Lefebvre rebutted them. They called crunch unfortunate but inevitable, and said they knew of no unpaid overtime or abusive conditions. McNamara felt unfairly maligned by former employees. He pointed to Steve Jobs, Sam Peckinpah and Werner Herzog as figures who had done worse with much less vilification. He added that the studio had improved conditions in the months after release, including the introduction of flexitime.

  In July 2011, confidential emails leaked, and staff said they showed a contentious relationship between Team Bondi and Rockstar. McNamara questioned how the emails could be shared and said it set a "pretty dangerous precedent". An anonymous source told GamesIndustry.biz that Rockstar "saved the project" but that the relationship was "badly damaged". The source said Team Bondi's management "resented Rockstar for taking lots of creative control". McNamara stayed optimistic and said "hopefully it doesn't have any hard feelings about us".

  After release, McNamara had predicted that future Team Bondi games would take less than five years, with MotionScan expanding to full body performance. That future did not arrive. In August 2011, the film production company Kennedy Miller Mitchell acquired Team Bondi's assets. The studio entered administration on the 30th of August and liquidation on the 5th of October. McNamara's next game, Whore of the Orient, was announced in November as a spiritual successor, under KMM Interactive Entertainment. Its prospective publisher left in late 2012, layoffs followed in 2013, and its cancellation was confirmed in 2016.

  McNamara and some Team Bondi alumni carried on at Video Games Deluxe. They also worked on post-release development of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy , The Definitive Edition in 2021. Rockstar acquired that company in 2025 and renamed it Rockstar Australia. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick called L.A. Noire "another strong franchise for this company" in May 2011. In February 2012, Rockstar said it was "considering what the future may hold for L.A. Noire as a series". In May 2021, Aaron Staton said he had "never heard word about a sequel", but that he "would be curious what they would tell" given that Phelps dies.

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