All posts tagged ceo

  • February 6, 2012

    Mess+Noise interview: ‘Heatwave Festival founder and CEO Patrick Whyntie’, January 2012

    An interview for Mess+Noise. Excerpt below.

    Heatwave Promoter Breaks Silence: ‘We Bit Off More Than We Could Chew’

    In his first interview since his fledgling hip-hop festival came to a dramatic close last week, besieged Heatwave promoter Patrick Whyntie tells ANDREW MCMILLEN that he’s determined to prove doubters wrong. 

    A festival “worse than any other failed festival in the history of Australian music” was how Tonedeaf reported on the final leg of Heatwave 2012, a national hip-hop tour that began in South Australia as a three-night camping festival on January 12 and ended in Melbourne on January 22. Between those dates, capital city shows were booked in Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and Canberra, in some of those cities’ biggest venues.

    The festival debuted in January 2010 with a single South Australian show, at Abbotts Reserve, 90 kilometres south of Adelaide. Headlined by American rapper Xzibit and Australian DJ tyDi, the all-ages event was attended by an estimated 800 people.

    Festival founder Patrick Whyntie – who also performs under the MC name Mastacraft – was 22 when he staged the 2010 show. His LinkedIn profile states that he has “been around the Australian entertainment industry for 10 years” and has “connections from Australia all the way to Detroit”. Whyntie had previously told the Victor Harbor Times that people were “blown away” by the first event. “There are a thousand things I can grow and build on for next year,” he said at the time, “but we had tons of security and everyone was safe.” Though there was no 2011 event, Whyntie returned to concert promotion in 2012 with a significantly ballsy move: a national hip-hop tour.

    Announced some 35 days before the tour’s first date, Heatwave 2012 – featuring Kid Cudi, D12, Obie Trice, Tech N9ne, Chamillionaire and Crazy Town – was an eclectic proposition from day one. By the end of the 10-day stint, D12 had missed most of the tour due to mishandling immigration paperwork, the Perth show was cancelled via Facebook on the day of the event, and the whole thing culminated in a disastrous Melbourne leg that saw liquor licensing issues, a no-show from Chamillionaire, and Kid Cudi trashing the stage after power was cut due to reported schedule mismanagement. A couple of Facebook hate pages emerged in the wake of the Melbourne show, with punters calling for refunds and describing it as “the biggest music festival fail ever”.

    Schadenfreude runs rife in the notoriously vicious live music industry, so it was unsurprising to see sections of the Australian music media taking delight in Heatwave’s perceived failures, especially following recent debacles such as Blueprint and BAM!. However, recent Flo Rida and Mos Def tour cancellations have highlighted how bringing US hip-hop artists in this country can be an exercise in hair-pulling frustration at the best of times, not to mention the difficulties faced by even seasoned promoters such as the Big Day Out’s Ken West.

    In an email interview with M+N, 24-year-old festival founder and CEO Patrick Whyntie speaks for the first time about the controversial 2012 events; his regrets, the so-called media “misrepresentation”, dealing with Kid Cudi, and what he’s learned after coordinating his first national festival.

    What inspired you to become a festival promoter in the first place, Patrick?
    Festivals are great fun and I wanted to bring some entertainment to my local area – which has never seen anything like this.

    I’m guessing that the 2010 event was a big learning experience. What did you learn?
    Quite a lot: from visas, to how much fencing was required, to how to deal with on-the-spot problems. A substantial learning curve.

    Who funded Heatwave 2012?
    Outside investment.

    Leading into your preparations for the 2012 event, were you concerned about whether or not the Australian market could support a national hip-hop festival like Heatwave?
    I think if all the stars align, any genre of music can be supported. It’s always a risky business, and things need time to grow. We did go too big, too quick.

    It seems to me that the festival’s main point of differentiation is its low cost. The festival’s marketing reflects this, and I saw on the event Facebook that you even taunted rival festivals about this. How did you manage to keep costs so low?
    We decided to put prices extremely low – the cost of, say, one concert act – to attract more people in. We took a risk keeping them low.

    Did the 2012 line-up reflect your particular musical tastes, or were you aiming to book a diverse group of bands to attract as many people as possible?
    Hip-hop is obviously my fave genre, however I listen to a wide range of music. We booked a range of hip-hop – from mainstream to underground – to reach all bases.

    Tell me about how you were feeling ahead of the tour’s first show, in Adelaide. Did you have all your ducks in a row? Were you happy with how the event planning and set-up went?
    Costs blew out substantially and we were having battles with council and police to keep the event going. This cost quite a bit of money and time, fighting something they should have supported. The camping festival [in SA] was a huge undertaking, and in hindsight, we would preferred to have concentrated solely on this [event], and had other national promoters taken the other states.

    At what point were you told that D12 had missed their flight?
    D12 was an ongoing struggle to coordinate them here to Australia. There was a range of problems. We were desperately trying to negotiate them getting here for the Saturday [for the first weekend, at the SA camping event], or even the Sunday.

    What happened next? Did you have a contingency plan in place, or did you have to scramble to make new plans?
    Just like most major festivals, an act sometimes does miss a few dates. We moved things around, of course.

    How many staff did you employ to assist with the festival?
    It varied in each state. SA had well over 50 staff, and even more volunteers.

    You told me via email that the Sydney and Canberra shows were “awesome”. What worked with those two shows, as opposed to the rest of the tour?
    Sydney ran well both nights, though minor problems occurred. The crowd was great for Sydney, aside from a guy running on stage and quickly being removed by our security guard.

    For the full interview, visit Mess+Noise.

    No Comments / Music Journalism, Published Writing /

  • June 27, 2011

    IGN Australia story: ‘Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years To Make?’, June 2011

    A feature story for IGN Australia. Excerpt below.

    Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years to Make?
    Examining the troubled development of Team Bondi’s opus.
    by Andrew McMillen


    Team Bondi’s film noir-inspired detective thriller L.A. Noire was released last month to critical and commercial success. Set in a lavish recreation of 1947 Los Angeles, the game eschewed a familiar open-world design for case-by-case detective gameplay that revolved around examining crime scenes and interrogating suspects. Featuring a vast city, cases that adjusted depending on the player’s actions and choices, and sophisticated motion capture technology that had never been used in a video game before, it was a mammoth project.

    So mammoth, in fact, that it took over seven years to complete, with a publisher switch – from Sony to Rockstar – midway through. That’s not the whole story, however. The development of L.A. Noire was anything but smooth.

    Much has been written about the long development cycles on games such as Duke Nukem Forever, Too Human, or Prey, but the story behind L.A. Noire’s rocky road to release stands out within Australia’s small, tightly-knit development community. Team Bondi’s crime drama is not just the biggest game development project ever undertaken in Australia, it also served as the first-ever project for many of the creative forces behind L.A. Noire. It’s perhaps the combination of all these factors that has resulted in surprisingly open testimonials from former Team Bondi members about their experience working on the game.

    Recently, a group of former Team Bondi employees launched a public website with an amended staff roll for L.A. Noire that includes 100 developers omitted from the official game credits. But the look behind the curtain started much earlier. On January 23 2010, an anonymous source on Twitter began leaking stories heard through the grapevine regarding the Sydney-based studio. The account wasn’t run by an ex-employee; it was anonymously dishing the dirt on Bondi as heard through unnamed sources, Wikileaks-style.

    The tweets alleged that studio founder Brendan McNamara had mismanaged Team Bondi and development of L.A. Noire, and had spent “tens of millions” on proprietary technology in just a year. Despite then-publisher Sony Computer Entertainment America’s faith in McNamara based on his PS2 hit The Getaway, Sony dropped the project in 2005, when the studio “had far exceeded SCEA’s expected price tag for the game.”

    According to the tweets, this situation “threw the studio into disarray. Strangely, McNamara quickly found hospice in his former rivals–the Houser brothers–and L.A. Noire was picked up by Rockstar [Games] in spring 2006… Since then, the game has been revamped, ported, and delayed four times. Rockstar spent more [than] Sony in their efforts to make it not suck.”

    Locally, when the tweets were reported by the Australian gaming industry hub Tsumea, several anonymous commenters stepped in to back up the reports: “I can certainly attest to the appalling working conditions, the angry and abusive boss and the ineffective leads who were completely unwilling to do anything to protect their team members,” wrote one. “It’s abhorrent that these young kids are being thrown into a 24/7 corpse grinder with perpetual crunch and weekend overtime,” wrote another.

    The comments on Tsumea recall events that took place in 2004, when an anonymous LiveJournal post by a user named ‘EA_spouse‘ expressed frustration at the fact that she rarely saw her fiancé, an employee of Electronic Arts, due to the long hours he was forced to work while attempting to meet deadlines for the title The Lord of the Rings: The Battle For Middle-Earth. The blog received wide press attention and eventually led to three class action lawsuits against EA for unpaid overtime.

    After the initial tweets and short-lived online discussions that followed, the situation returned to all-quiet-on-the-Bondi-front. In the meantime, there was finally light at the end of the tunnel: L.A. Noire’s worldwide release date had been set for mid-May 2011. The game would finally see the light of day, but many questions remained. Are the allegations true? Why did it take seven years to bring L.A. Noire to market?

    IGN Australia reached out to dozens of former Team Bondi employees to help get a deeper look and tell the story. Eleven agreed to speak on the record, under the condition of anonymity; many feared reprisal from current and future employers if they were to be tagged as whistleblowers. The combined experience of these former staff is extensive: between them, they represent 24 years of service. Their individual tenures range from a few months, to four years, and they include artists, programmers, animators, and software engineers. We also spoke extensively with Team Bondi studio head Brendan McNamara for his perspective.

    For the full story, visit IGN Australia.

    This story runs to 4,500 words. It’s the biggest story of my career thus far, in terms of length, readership, and impact. As is hopefully apparent, a lot of work went into this story.

    I first pitched it to my editor at IGN on February 14, 2011. My initial email, entitled ‘Story pitch: What was it like to work on L.A. Noire?‘, is below.

    Hi mate,

    Just catching up on some industry news via Tsumea and elsewhere. Am loving the allegations by (seemingly) dozens of anonymous ex-Team Bondi employees about the horrible working conditions behind L.A. Noire.

    Favourite comment? “It’s abhorrent that these young kids are being thrown into a 24/7 corpse grinder with their perpetual crunch and weekend overtime.”

    I’d like to investigate these allegations and find out how much truth there is to it. Like my Krome story, could be the case of ex-employees agreeing to speak anonymously. As long as we can verify that they were employed by the company and they know what they’re talking about, we should be good to go. Right?

    Interested?

    Andrew

    It wasn’t until I got the nod from my editor and began reaching out to former Team Bondi employees that I realised the Tsumea story was published in 2010, not this year. Those allegations had existed for over a year, and no-one had checked them out. Curious.

    As mentioned in the story, I contacted dozens of former Bondi employees. Some were silent; some told me to leave the story alone, as they didn’t want their former colleagues to suffer in the event of the allegations being found to be true. Over the months, I rounded up eleven ex-Bondi workers who were happy to speak to me, anonymously, about their experiences working for the studio.

    Rockstar Games found out quite early on that I was investigating this story – via an overzealous source contacting an existing Rockstar employee, I think. They weren’t particularly happy. In an attempt to ensure balanced coverage, they eventually offered me access to Team Bondi CEO Brendan McNamara – though speaking with him was necessary if the story was ever going to be published, as it would be rather slanderous to publish the ex-employees’ comments without juxtaposing them against the responses of their former boss. Yet, as picked up by many of those who commented on IGN and the article’s resultant media coverage, McNamara did little to deny what I’d been told by his former staff.

    With a gestation time of over four months, this is by far the longest amount of time I’ve spent pursuing a single story. It was worth it, though, because I feel that it’s a story that needed to be told. I hope you agree.

    A final note: I’m interested in pursuing this story – and stories like it – on an ongoing basis. If you’d like to share your experience of working for Team Bondi and/or Rockstar Games, you can email me here.

    4 Comments / Feature Journalism, Published Writing, Tech Journalism /