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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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire
A lot of movies also put little things in the end credits now to make it more interesting for people to stay, so its not all bad.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
What's the point in a list of names I care nothing about? Yes, the list of 100 names flowing before me created the game I enjoyed, big whoop! You know something? I really don't care. Just give me the full ending for the game already. If something impressed me enough, (which would usually be the music), I'll go and look for the composer myself, which is always a simple google/imdb search away.
Nope. The copyright laws have nothing to say on the matter. Credits aren't required at all, they're basically coerced into existence by the people who need them to prove the point for their resumes. I did work on 4 games for which I'm uncredited, and 2 for which I'm credited. The difference was all in my negotiating position for the 6 releases.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Most of the bigger development places will make at least a cursory check to see if you are actually listed in the credits for something you claimed to work on. If mobygames won't turn you up, for example, it may mean you get a question at the interview about what your contributions were and why you weren't credited.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
And for some of those who stayed with Atari, little secret easter eggs were snuck into their games.
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"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.
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.
As far as I'm aware, "fair credit" comes in the form of a paycheck. Everything else is just gravy.
"Nobody" watches the credits of a video game. Really I don't see any reason for them to be there at all. It only causes problems like this, and doesn't actually accomplish anything other than ego stroking.