Trivia / L.A. Noire

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• Actor Allusion:
  • In "The Consul's Car", Valdez angrily calls Cole a madman.
  • In "The Golden Butterfly," while Moller is being interviewed at the station, he insists that the cops should "give [him] that lie test." In Heroes, Moller's actor plays a character who is a lie detector.
  • This isn't the first time Michael McGrady has played an LAPD Detective; he was Det. Daniel Salinger in Southland.
  • Keith Szarabajka's character having served in World War I.
• Creator Killer: Even though the game was a decent success critically and commercially, Team Bondi closed their doors on October 15, 2011, only a few months after release. Word got out about how the studio suffered from terrible working conditions, high staff turnover, and endless delays. The Troubled Production destroyed their relationship with Rockstar and ensured they would never get another publisher. The next project, Whore of the Orient, never made it past conception stage.
• Defictionalization: Hey kids, you now can get your very own L.A. Noire notebook, now go get cracking on those cases!
• Fake Nationality:
  • American Leland Monroe and German Elsa Lichtmann are played by Australian-born John Noble and Erika Heynatz, respectively. However, Elsa's singing voice is provided by Claudia Brücken, who is German, even if she only sings in English.
  • Roy Earle is played by Canadian-born Adam Harrington.
• Hostility on the Set: Many employees described Brendan McNamara and his behavior as a tyrant and a bully and one of the angriest people in the world, He would scream and lash out at his employees if he didn't get his way and his behavior was described to be so stress-inducing, some staff members would quit after 2 weeks. Even McNamara would admit this by describing the situation as "Things got violent".
• Real-Life Relative: Aaron Staton and Connie Fletcher, who are married in real life, play in-game couple Cole and Marie Phelps.
• Saved from Development Hell: Trailers were running for this game for at least four years before its release, and judging from the increase in "Rockstarisms" in the later trailers, it underwent many design changes.
• Troubled Production: Team Bondi was by all accounts... a shitty place to work. How shitty? There was only one animation artist, which is why all of the non-motion captured movement was extremely stilted. Plus, studio head Brendan McNamara was charitably described as "a tyrant" by most of the workers, chewing up and spitting out a huge amount of prospective employees and subjecting whoever was left to insane amounts of unpaid overtime. The end result was the company gaining the ire of Australia's game development community, Rockstar cutting their ties, and L.A. Noire being Team Bondi's first and last game.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Reportedly, the game was originally so large that they had to cut out much of the content just to fit the core story cases onto three disks for the Xbox 360. While several cases related to the existing desks have been released (5 in total, comprising roughly 4 GB of data), there's still a lot more content that is unaccounted for. This is noticeable at several points, such as a throwaway line near the beginning of "A Marriage Made in Heaven" concerning a girl named Anna Rodriguez, which makes no sense unless you play the PS3 version or the Complete Edition on PC/360, where the case "The Consul's Car" is included. Also, "The Naked City" explains Bekowsky's sudden promotion to Homicide, as seen at the start of "Manifest Destiny".
  • The game was originally supposed to have a Burglary and Fraud Division Cole played through but were cut in the final release. Rumors were spread that they might later turn up in a DLC but that was later canceled due to other issues. For the Burglary Desk it is assumed that Cole's partner would have been Harold Caldwell, seeing as they have "catching up" to do. The kicker: Harold Caldwell was voiced by Brandon Keener, a.k.a Garrus Vakarian.
  • Looking at the case numbers in the official strategy guide, large gaps in the number sequence are noticeable. For instance, the Traffic cases skip from 1 to 3 to 5. Since "The Consul's Car" takes place between "The Driver's Seat" and "A Marriage Made in Heaven", its safe to assume that it's supposed to be Traffic Case #2. The Homicide desk is the only desk with a full case number sequence at the start.
  • The DLC only covers cases cut from the desks that actually made it into the game. The Burglary and "Bunko" (fraud) desks were cut entirely, and although the developers had hinted that they might complete them and release them as DLC, given Team Bondi's liquidation, this possibility now looks highly unlikely. The game hints towards this when you first switch from Traffic to Homicide, subtly by noting a 6 month gap between the two and explicitly when the chief informs the staff that Phelps was promoted from Burglary.
  • Cole's sudden aggression and over-the-top accusations when using the "Doubt" option are because it was originally named "Force", and the lines were written with the idea that he was deliberately antagonizing a suspect to draw them out if he has no evidence to prove they're lying. At one point, the player also had the option to simply beat confessions out of suspects at the cost of a lower case rating, but was cut as most of the beta testers abused it. The concept gets revisited in the remastered version where the options are now Good Cop, Bad Cop, and Accuse.

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