When you literally put the word "Rockstar" in the name of your company, you can expect some very raucous, rock & roll production difficulties, as Rockstar Games has learned the hard way over the years from both its own productions and those of some of its satellite studios.
- Agent was a game that Rockstar was working on in the late '00s, boasting a retro '70s setting and a world-spanning Spy Fiction plot inspired by classic James Bond in which players would visit the French Riviera, the Swiss Alps, Cairo, and outer space. After its announcement at 2009 followed by no further information until Rockstar quietly abandoned the trademark in 2018, it became a white whale for Rockstar fans wondering what became of it. In 2023, this blog post
by former Rockstar North developer Obbe Vermeij (later deleted after he received a cease-and-desist from Rockstar) revealed that the answer was simple: Rockstar North was working on Agent simultaneously with Grand Theft Auto IV's expansions and Grand Theft Auto V, and when Rockstar's flagship franchise began demanding more attention, more of the studio's staff were taken off of Agent, leaving the project in limbo. Eventually, it was punted off to another dev team, where it quietly became vaporware. - L.A. Noire completely destroyed Team Bondi due to the lead designer having serious rage issues and treating it like his masterpiece. In order to get the game back on budget, they hired and chewed up nearly every budding game programmer and artist in Sydney (some of whom completely abandoned the industry due to their treatment) and were so hostile toward their publisher, Rockstar Games, that Rockstar publicly swore off ever working with them again. Team Bondi shut down shortly after the game was released. Said lead designer and other ex-Team Bondi staff reportedly went to work on a Spiritual Successor titled The Whore Of The Orient, but it was officially put on hold in 2016.
- Max Payne 3 saw the series change hands from Remedy Entertainment to Rockstar Games, and became as troubled and chaotic as any Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead title.
- According to former Rockstar staff, the game started development as a project by Rockstar Vienna shortly after Remedy parted ways to work on Alan Wake. However, Rockstar shut down the Vienna studio in 2006 during pre-production, moving the game's development to Rockstar Vancouver, who proceeded to reboot the project.
- Max Payne 3 became public in a 2009 GameInformer cover story with a planned released date of "Winter 2009", but after its reveal, it fell out of sight for two years. During that time, accounts of mismanagement and employee mistreatment, such as the aforementioned Rockstar Wives letter, put Rockstar under controversy, and allegations from an ex-employee state that the game's story went through no less than three complete rewrites and had the developers putting in 16-hour work days with no days off. In a Jason Schreier story for Kotaku regarding Rockstar's crunch culture, developers described working on the game as a "death march".
- In the end, what started as a single studio endeavor became a project that required the full attention of Rockstar's worldwide studios to complete, likely drawing resources away from the then-in-development Grand Theft Auto V and leading to the quiet cancelation of Bully 2. It is estimated that the game cost Rockstar $105 million USD to make, more than Red Dead Redemption and roughly equal to Grand Theft Auto IV.
- According to former Rockstar staff,
- Red Dead Redemption: According to emails released following Leslie Benzies' departure from Rockstar Games and subsequent lawsuit against the studio and its founders, Sam and Dan Houser, the game was so rough and unplayable just months before its release in 2010 that Sam Houser desperately emailed Benzies for help in getting the game in working order. According to the lawsuit and emails, while the Housers were Rockstar's "idea guys" who handled most of the creative aspects, Benzies oversaw programming and development management, and things turned nasty when the Housers tried to go without Benzies in RDR. While Benzies did save the day, the frantic development crunch and resulting tangled mess of code ensured that RDR will likely never get an Updated Re-release on PC or eighth-gen consoles (however, a PlayStation 4 and Switch remaster were finally released by Rockstar in 2023), as Rockstar did not want to risk a Porting Disaster like Grand Theft Auto IV's PC version. Worse, the crunch required from the staff to get the game finished was bad enough that several anonymous spouses of Rockstar San Diego employees wrote a scathing letter that accused Rockstar's management, in no uncertain terms, of destroying the lives of their employees through stress. While RDR won rave reviews and became Rockstar's biggest success outside of Grand Theft Auto, the experience soured the working relationship between Benzies and the Housers.
