Team Bondi's lead coder, Dave Heironymous has been defending the developer amidst accusations of tough working conditions during the of LA Noire.

Heironymous acknowledges that ha may be labelled a puppet studio boss for Brendan McNamara but he suggested that those who were criticising the work practices were out to get the studio.

In defence he said: "What is the motivation behind these attacks on Team Bondi? If the motivation were to see improvement in the working conditions at Team Bondi, then I'm all for it. However, some of these comments in recent stories seem to go beyond that. Some ex-employees who left the company years ago want to see destroyed. They want to see 35 game developers out of a job. That seems to me to be a less laudable motivation."

He continued:"I can't say that no-one ever worked 100 hours per week, but those sorts of hours were not encouraged. In fact, if someone on my team was working that hard I would have done my best to stop them. I never (and in my experience, neither did any of the other managers) expected anything from my team that I didn't expect of myself. The management team at Team Bondi was not ensconced in an Ivory Tower working normal hours while everyone else crunched."

He rounded off his defence saying: "No-one at Team Bondi is under the illusion that crunching is a good way to work and we're actively working to learn from our mistakes for our next project. The people at Team Bondi are great to work with and I'm confident that we can make Team Bondi a leading game studio on the international stage."

Thanks Gamasutra.

By Ewan Aiton