Lair cursed from start to finish
Sometimes when you combine things, they form something even greater than its parts, like peanut butter and jelly, or the five robot cats that form Voltron. Other times, like when you combine Factor 5 and ghosts, you get Lair. "I am not a believer in ghosts, but this one was haunted," Lair director Julian Eggebrecht explains to MTV's Stephen Totilo.
Factor 5's Eggebrecht and producer Brian Krueger even admit in Lair's in-game commentary that there was a "dragon-game curse". Ranging from contrast problems with the very first trailer, to power outages during the writing of the master disk, nothing would go Factor 5's way during the development of Lair.
Eggebrecht and his team's struggle with the creation of Lair may be the exception rather than the rule in the video game development business, but it does help people outside of the industry understand just how tough making a game can be. The Lair director explains that "every single time there was a crucial delivery, something bizarre went wrong", even sickness and deaths within employees' families.
Maybe Lair is not everything PS3 owners were hoping for, but maybe they deserve some credit too for completing a game under such trying circumstances. It's good to know that even with all that they had going against them, the Factor 5 team still had time to have a little fun and hot coffee.
