14 DAY TRIAL // Following yesterday's news about Lair (just click on the link, it's too much information to sum up in a few words), 1UP.com mentions an interview of Lair lead director at Factor 5 Julian Eggebrecht with MTV's GameFile, where Eggebrecht reveals even more reasons to why development on Lair was a bitch. Apparently, the whole project was "cursed"... literally.
"I am not a believer in ghosts, but this one was haunted," said Eggebrecht. According to the upper mentioned website, "the setbacks started in May 2005, when the PS3 had its first big unveiling at Sony's E3 press conference." Eggebrecht claims that Factor 5 assembled the trailer and "delivered it just in time to make it in the show, but the trailer was dark to begin with and the frames had an even darker black-level than Sony expected," the site reveals.
"They showed the material at the last minute to [former Sony Computer Entertainment President Ken] Kutaragi-san, who didn't see a thing and bounced us off the [PS3's demo] reel. That's why the first tech-trailer was shown at the PlayStation meeting a few months later. That was the start of one catastrophe after the other -- deaths in the family at the worst time [and] sudden surgeries for key members, which bounced the technology off-track. And just in general, every single time there was a crucial delivery, something bizarre went wrong -- all the way to power outages when writing the master disks."
Spooky stuff! Lair isn't that dark of title you know (well, not horror-like dark), so you can't say the team could live with the impression that someone was constantly watching them from behind, while designing the game's graphics (that feeling you have when you watch horror movies). I hope I'm making my point clear here...
Anyway power outages and that sort of stuff, everyone can understand and not be paranoid about. Even surgeries for team members, but deaths in the family along with the previously mentioned happenings...? Yup, a little strange to say the least.