Nice Game! No Credit For You, Though 58
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."
Atari all over again? (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Re:What I dont understand is why (Score:2, Informative)
Not a new problem (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is preculiar... (Score:3, Informative)
If you go to a play, you don't get someone shouting all the mains' names during the opening act. You're lucky if everyone gets an individual bow during the curtain call. But you will get a program with bios of the important people and a list of everyone else. Which is just how it should be.
The credits should never have been part of the performance. With video games it's even easier. You don't have to worry about space, a PDF with thousands of names and a few bios won't take more than a few hundred kB. As long as the list is on the disk or in the manual, that should be sufficient. Anyone can look up the names if they want to, but no one is forced to watch page after page of "Key Grip's Page" scroll by if they don't want to.
Digital TV offers us additional options as well. Imagine stuffing an exhaustive list onto a data segment like closed captioning. Players could be made that record the list for perusal at any point during the show, and the list could be searchable. Heck, you could conceivably have a button that identifies all of the characters on the screen and their actors with a label just under their head. Such a list could be made far more complete than what you could send in a few minutes of scrolling with a font large enough to be read on a standard definition television.