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Nice Game! No Credit For You, Though
In an interview with GameDaily earlier this week, IGDA's Jason Della Rocca expressed his extreme frustration over Rockstar's handling of the credits on Manhunt 2. You may recall that the core group that initially made the game at Rockstar Vienna were completely left off of the final credits . One of the producers has taken the step of speaking out about the poor treatment he received from the company. Producer Jurie Horneman initially expressed his displeasure on his blog, but followed that up with comments made to the site Next Generation. "I get the impression that Rockstar New York tried to close the Vienna branch as quickly and quietly as possible. The offices were closed down during E3 2006, making it likely that the news would be buried ... As I recall there was never an official press release stating we were closed - it even took some time before it was officially acknowledged we'd been closed down."
I thought copyright laws demanded them be at least listed.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activision
Sounds a bit similar to Atari in the late 70's early 80's. They didn't credit their developers, so several of them left and formed Activision, which credited their devs quite a bit (commercials, print ads, etc).
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Why not credit the developers? Why go to such lengths to conceal the closing of an office? What did they stand to gain or loose?
Seems like a pretty odd way to behave and whatever they did gain is probably not worth the minor shit storm this has kicked up.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The International Game Developers Association has been working on this sort of problem and is trying to come up with guidelines for giving fair credit to game developers http://www.igda.org/credit/. Perhaps this will give them a bit more attention.
Rock stars have been famously ripped off by unscrupulous producers and managers, so now a "Rockstar" is ripping off a producer.
If you list the designers, then you should list the developers. If you list the developers, then you should list the QA team. If the QA team gets credit, then you should also include Operations...
Eventually, to be "fair", you'd have to list the whole company. If you draw the line somewhere else other than all or none, then you'll be leaving someone off arbitrarily.
This was one of the arguments put forward at Apple to justify removing individual credits from Mac OS X.
"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
I have been left off several of the credits for games I worked on*.
It sucks at the time. After all credit is just that... being given credit for the work you did. Not being given the credit you earned is kind of a blow.
The thing you really quickly realize is that there's almost never actual malice behind it. A marketing drone or some exec's PA is given the task of gathering the names of everyone involved. When they don't know the dev process well enough to cover a chunk of one department, get the names of the people who're out that day, get the names of people who did the original build but are now on a different project, etc... those people get missed. There's no malice, just a complete lack of awareness from someone who has no notion of what the credit means to the people who sweated over the game.
So, you can get bitter about it and spend energy blaming and hating people... Or you can accept laziness and lack of consideration are unfortunate but they happen.
*Ironically, the MobyGames list misses me from all of the Planetside games - the one place where my ideas actually got directly included in gameplay whereas I'm credited for plenty of games where I only did behind the scenes work.
it being an accident as quickly as they could have, and promised to fix the credits in the next patch or a small, quick update. Sounds like it was something that should have been handled with proper diplomacy, and wasn't. Not like it's the first time it's ever happened in a game. Besides, my name didn't make the credits in Halo 3. (Certainly, I'm not a development house, but still.)
Evolve, damn you!
Notice that there are ZERO credits to open the Star Wars movies?
Know how much trouble Lucas got into for that? Lots. He eventually had to leave the Directors Guild over it, I believe. Becuase there are *rules* about who has to be credited at the start of the movie, art and story be damned.
Its like doing a huge research project or a book with a bunch of people and not being able to have your name on the end. It has nothing to do with the public except those who are interested.
I would be royally pissed off if I worked one something for many months or years and I dont even get to have my name on the product.
Can I do Help -> About in Windows Vista and see credits for the thousands who helped write that program? What about Mac OSX? Hell what about Firefox?
Why do video game developers for some reason get put on this pedestal compared to other developers - it is all coding. In the end, they did their job, they got paid for it, end of story. This isn't another EA scandal here, this is just a bunch of whiny babies.
The credits are not for you, they are for the people who worked on the project. A lot of those people made huge sacrifices so you could kill that final monster. You don't have to sit through them all.
Yeah, it's stupid as hell, but I felt a shiver when I first saw my name at the end of a game I worked on.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!