Rumour: Rockstar Spent Over $20 Million On L.A. Noire Since 2006

Severe Salt Warning: L.A. Noire has been "revamped, ported and delayed four times" since 2006, with Rockstar spending more money on the project than Sony, which has already pumped an alleged $20 million to the cause.

That's the rumour coming from Twitter recently, with an anonymous user registering on Friday and writing candidly about the history of studio Team Bondi and its head Brendan McNamara. Of course, there's no way to ascertain the credibility of anything that has been said, so take this with a vat of salt for the time being.

Perhaps the juiciest part of the statement is in the word "ported", suggesting that L.A. Noire may not be a PlayStation 3 exclusive after all. The Twitter user states that Sony wrote off its $20m development cost in exchange for Rockstar maintaining console-exclusivity, which would appear to contradict with that conclusion.

The game has had a rough history since work started on it in 2003, but according to the Tweeter, problems with McNamara and Sony were more problematic than first thought. Originally, Sony was keen to be the publisher for L.A. Noire following the sales success of The Getaway (a game that was also riddled with delays), but McNamara felt burned by SCEE's alleged bureaucracy and only wanted in if European heads weren't involved.

That led to several unchallenged delays in the title, which aimed to release on the same date as the PS3's launch. “It became obvious that year that McNamara had little clue what he was doing and was just following his arbitrary whims,” reads the Twitter page, which reveals that “by 2005, the studio had far exceeded SCEA's expected price tag for the game; tens of millions had spent on new proprietary tech in a year.”

Following a restructure, SCEE bosses looked at the project in 2005, only to see “ an unplayable game filled with superfluous content.” After pumping $20 million into the project, Sony ceased support, leaving Team Bondi to flounder as employees left at an astonishing rate.

Rockstar picked up the studio (and the game) in 2006 and showed a trailer to celebrate the fact – the Twitter user says that this trailer was created by an art outsourcing firm in Sydney, and not by the developers.

The idea that Rockstar has spent more than Sony's cool $20 million trying “to make [L.A. Noire] not suck”, if true, is quite the astonishing revelation, and would go a long way to explaining some of Sony's financial troubles in attempting to support the PlayStation 3 in the first few years of its life.

Rockstar announced on Friday that it will be revealing the game in full next month – the Twitter postings appear to have been made in response to the news story. Will seven years and several design changes in the making work in L.A. Noire's favour? Well, we don't have long to find out, at least.