“Lair was a genuine fuck-up by everybody involved, probably me the worst,” says Julian Eggebrecht, one of Factor 5’s co-founders, about the studio’s disappointing PlayStation 3 game. The approximately $25 million project, a game about dragons and fantasy warfare, took three years to develop, which included a yearlong delay. From faulty studio decisions, publisher strife and arguments regarding studio dynamics, Lair fought its way out from the studio that created it.

Lair itself did not ruin Factor 5 — although the circumstances didn’t help — but it ended a relationship with Sony and left the studio dangling in searching of a follow-up project that never came.

Before Lair

The history of Lair intertwines with the history of Factor 5. Back in the late ‘80s, the German studio began working alongside Europe’s PC boom, plugging away on action games like Turrican (and its sequels) before switching over to consoles. In 1992, LucasArts and Factor 5 began a lasting relationship, beginning with the platformer Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures on Super Nintendo.

After a series of early hits, the partnership proved strong enough that LucasArts helped Factor 5 move to the U.S. in 1996. In those days, Eggebrecht says LucasArts was the team’s “sugar daddy,” helping to fund a steady stream of Star Wars related titles and giving the studio consistent work.

As time went on, the Nintendo 64 and GameCube Star Wars flight combat games Rogue Squadron and Rogue Leader defined the studio. Yet shortly after their releases, things began to change between the two companies.

At first, Factor 5 signed a three-game deal with then-LucasArts president Simon Jeffery, starting with a third game in its Star Wars flight combat series: Rebel Strike for GameCube.

The second game in the deal was to be an updated compilation of Factor 5’s Star Wars trilogy for Xbox, but when Jeffery left LucasArts in 2003, a new regime led by Jim Ward took over and put the game on hold. Quoted in a press release soon after taking over, Ward stated, “To make LucasArts thrive and to position ourselves for the long-term future, we need to make some fundamental changes.”

“That was a big bummer,” says Eggebrecht. “Microsoft said, let’s make lemonade out of lemons here. ... We’ve got the Xbox 360 coming up, so if [LucasArts doesn’t] want to ship [Rogue Squadron Trilogy], then please let’s work on a launch title for the 360. So what we then pitched was supposed to be called Rogue Squadron: X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter.”

“You could write a book about [Lair]. ... It’s a story of really smart people who, because of circumstances, put something together that didn’t quite turn out as successful as you think it would.”

The emphasis in Factor 5’s pitch went toward online multiplayer, with cooperative Death Star battles and other scenarios from the films. “Microsoft, of course, was ecstatic,” Eggebrecht says. Work began and progressed on the project, based on the pitch.

Then, a top-level decision nearly sunk Factor 5, according to Eggebrecht. “LucasArts, suddenly out of the blue, stopped paying us,” he says. “We had a pay-or-play deal [a financial guarantee regardless of whether a project is finished] but they still just decided, ‘We don’t know about this whole thing about launch titles.’ We told them, ‘Unless we find a way out of this, you might bring the whole studio into bankruptcy.’”

[We made multiple attempts to reach staff from LucasArts who were involved in these deals, but were unable to track down anyone willing to participate in this story.]

LucasArts’ output slowed under Ward across the board. In 2003, as Factor 5 finished and released Rebel Strike, LucasArts published nine games. A year after Ward stepped in, the number dropped to four.

Sensing trouble when payments stopped, Eggebrecht started reaching out to other publishers. With the PlayStation 3 looming, Factor 5 pitched an original IP for Sony’s hardware, a WWI-inspired tactics game called Animal Wars. The turn-based game used ground and air combat, was set between two factions of animals, and had an allegorical basis in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. “The whole thing was a reflection of human society,” says Eggebrecht, regarding this metaphorical, all-animals project. According to Eggebrecht, Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida greenlit the project.

During this same period, Factor 5’s LucasArts deal soured as the company continued to hold payments, says Eggebrecht. By October of 2004, he made a decision. “I told LucasArts and Microsoft, if one of the two of them wouldn’t pay us for the Star Wars work ... then we would have to go somewhere else with that half of the team.”

Neither company agreed to fully fund development, he says, and Eggebrecht returned to Sony to fill a hole in its development schedule. Sony showed no interest Star Wars. Eggebrecht says he believes this was due to bad blood between Sony and LucasArts over unpaid debts on the part of LucasArts. Factor 5 then used its Lord of the Rings fandom and pitched something called Dragon Knight — which later became Lair. “At that moment when we pitched Lair ... they said we’re going forward with it and Animal Wars, but our condition is you’re exclusive to us,” says Eggebrecht.

What followed was a chaotic development of missed deadlines, disagreements over motion controls, excess and ego.

“You could write a book about [Lair]. ... It’s a story of really smart people who, because of circumstances, put something together that didn’t quite turn out as successful as you think it would for how much talent was on that team and how much money we spent,” says level designer Marc Wilhelm.

Says Lair level designer Joe Spataro, “I wish we would have shipped [Animal Wars] instead.”

Dragon Knight

Eggebrecht’s original vision for Dragon Knight was quite different from what ended up shipping in Lair. “Essentially it was a war between two religious factions, slightly based on the idea of what’s been going on in the Middle East,” says Eggebrecht.

“It was after 9/11. George Bush was calling for this war. It was very much this ‘either you’re with us or against us’ kind of thing. ‘We can tell a story that has meaning and depth and says something.’ We took that to heart. We really tried to make an anti-war story,” says Wilhelm.

The player starred as a mercenary, flying above battlefields, scanning the land and choosing whether or not to support a side. “Would you go down to help, or would you not help at all and just grab the money and bring it back to your lair? That’s fundamentally where the name Lair then came from,” says Eggebrecht.

Those concepts didn’t make it into the final design for Lair. Eggebrecht claims that changes to the original pitch were made by Sony, supposedly fearful of the open world concept and religious themes. Near the end of 2004, not long after production began, Lair’s concept took its final shape.

“That was a fundamental, really bad mistake that we made and Sony had absolutely nothing to do with that. It was our own stupidity.”

“What we kept was that the bad guy was actually a religious leader. That was about the only glimpse that remained. The open world went away. It had to be a linear game. It had to have the traditional hero’s journey, and quite frankly, at that point in time — which was relatively early within the first half year — I lost half of my interest in the game,” says Eggebrecht.

Eggebrecht’s minimized interest aside, with Animal Wars and Lair providing Factor 5 with work in the absence of LucasArts, Lair proceeded under the idea of being a launch console title. As time went on, Lair turned into something larger than Factor 5 had produced previously.

“For the time, Lair was one of the game industry’s mega projects,” says art director Gaurav Mathur. At peak development, between 120-140 people worked on the game inside Factor 5, intending to release it in Nov. 2006. As Lair came together, additional staff continued on Animal Wars.

Under the new direction, Lair’s development turned it into a linear, level-focused game about two societies at war with one another. Believing the PlayStation 3 to be a shift in how games were designed, Factor 5 threw out all of its old tools, rewriting them from scratch.

“That, quite frankly, was the single biggest mistake throughout Lair’s whole development. Not only did we have this completely new system to learn, but we also had no base technology,” says Eggebrecht. “That was a fundamental, really bad mistake that we made and Sony had absolutely nothing to do with that. It was our own stupidity.”

The public’s first glimpse of Lair came at Sony’s E3 press conference in May of 2005. In a one-minute pre-rendered trailer, a dragon stoops on a mountain in the rain, then the screen flashes with visions of dragons fighting. “It was not very representative of what the game was at all. We were still trying to figure out what we were doing,” says Wilhelm.

“[The trailer] was still on prototype hardware. We had to write out every single frame because the real-time framerate of the thing was about one or two frames a second. We never had cheated before. ... We probably should have stepped back and said ‘Look guys, our target here is a 60fps game. This is not going to work out. We’re doing something fundamentally wrong,’” says Eggebrecht.

“I guess we believed the hype on the machine. Ken Kutaragi’s field of distortion must have worked there in a very bad way.”

Technical artist David Cohen came onto Lair near the time of Lair’s public debut. Cohen’s work became that of repair. Factor 5’s initial estimates of the PlayStation 3’s power overvalued its capabilities. The studio’s dedication to visual fidelity, in conjunction with growing hardware power, made the possibilities seem endless. “They did a couple of tests early on and they thought, ‘Oh wow, this PS3, it’s just going to look like movies no matter what. We don’t need to optimize anything if we just go to full film assets.’ We had to bring them back down to what could be done on a PS3,” says Cohen.

“Julian and company succeeded with Rogue Squadron because they did things a certain way. They really prioritized visual fidelity. Then you got to the PS3 and shockingly beautiful became so expensive and so complicated. The things you needed to do to support a game that had that level of fidelity — the problems became exponentially more difficult,” says designer Seppo Helava, who signed on with Factor 5 late in Lair’s development.

“I guess we believed the hype on the machine. Ken Kutaragi’s [former chairman and group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment] field of distortion must have worked there in a very bad way. ... You should never believe the hype from the hardware manufacturers. Very big mistake,” says Eggebrecht.

Behind the scenes, work progressed on Lair, but it was often incomplete and scattered. Prospective employees came in to interview based on Factor 5’s reputation. They didn’t see much of what Lair would become.

When Marc Wilhelm came to interview, around Oct. 2005 and nearly a year into Lair’s production, he saw a brief prototype. “I was like, ‘Oh wow, you guys really made progress.’” Once Wilhelm was hired, Lair’s reality became apparent. “I was like, ‘Show me the rest of it.’ And they’re like, ‘No, that’s all we have.’ ... I was like, ‘Is there anyway I can go onto Animal Wars?’ It looked so cool. The stuff with Lair was like, ‘eh.’ Not that many people were very excited about it.”

Senior designer Sylvain Dubrofsky came on around the same time as Wilhelm. “There’s not a lot of gameplay here,” he thought upon seeing the game. “It wasn’t decided what the game was going to be. It was prettier than it was fun.”

The motion controls

Despite a year of development, Lair didn’t make Sony’s E3 2006 presentation. Factor 5 failed to gain a mention during a scroll of PlayStation 3 developers in the waning moments of a famously awkward Sony press conference (which featured the debut of president and CEO of Sony Corporation Kaz Hirai’s “Riiiidge Racer!” quote, among other blunders). On top of that, a reboot of the PlayStation launch title Warhawk debuted during the show, making public a new Sixaxis PS3 controller with built-in motion capabilities. Some members of the Factor 5 team looked on in horror.

“I remember sitting there with about 10 people watching Sony’s press conference and the $599 and laughing. Then the motion control thing. We were laughing about it at first and then it dawned on us, ‘Shit, [Sony is] going to make us use this,’” says designer Dubrofsky.

And, according to Eggebrecht, that’s what happened next.

The team’s nervousness around motion controls concerned the implementation. Lair’s motion concept turned the motion controls into simulated “reigns” of sorts, like controlling a horse, albeit one that flies. Making it work became a struggle of trying to find a sweet spot. The up-and-down gestures required only specific motions. Anything else led to an incorrect input.

“Your tendency when doing those was to kind of to pull up a little bit before you pushed down, because you’re pretending they’re reigns. If you can do that very specifically, not only did you get a misrecognized gesture, you were doing the exact opposite thing that you wanted to do. ... Stuff like that does not make for great gameplay,” says tools engineer Andy Vella.

But, because Eggebrecht saw possibilities, Sony’s marketing showcase for the PlayStation 3’s Sixaxis motion controls became Lair. However, through development, traditional analog stick controls also remained part of the design.

“All of the designers were unanimous that we didn’t like [the motion controls] and it wasn’t how the game was meant to be played. We ended up shipping it that way and none of us were happy,” says another designer, Joe Spataro.

“I thought that motion controls could work for Lair in the sense that if we could loosen up the game to be not as pinpoint accuracy-wise as the Rogue Squadron games were that you would forgive certain stuff in the motion controls. In hindsight it was stupid to think that,” says Eggebrecht.

Through its development, motion controls offered an additional way to play in conjunction with a choice to play with analog sticks. Prior to launch, the decision to use motion controls exclusively was not Factor 5’s but Sony’s, according to Eggebrecht.

According to a former member of the Warhawk team, who asked to remain anonymous because they don’t have permission to speak publicly about it, Sony did not force the team to use motion controls. They say Sony supported the decision to implement both analog stick and motion controls as options. For Factor 5, this wasn’t the case, according to Eggebrecht.

“The marketing department said, ‘We need one game to really show off this stuff, and [the Warhawk team] isn’t enthusiastic about it,’” says Eggebrecht. “‘They don’t want to do it. Could you guys do it?’ They put a ton of pressure on us and said, ‘You have to be the showcase motion control title. You’ll figure out how it works.’”

In a 2007 interview with GameTrailers, former executive vice president of Sony Europe Phil Harrison denied this. “[It] was definitely not mandated by us. We’ve always said all along that the use of the Sixaxis is something that should be decided by the developer in tune with their creative vision for the game, so it’s not something we would mandate.”

Paired with motion controls, the field of view became a point of contention. Seppo Helava, hired to design DLC that was canceled a week after he started, began refining controls and with that, the field of view. “A first-person shooter at the time would have like a 90-degree viewing angle,” says Helava. “Lair was more on the order of like a 30-degree cone in front. So it was a very narrow field of view.”

A narrow field of view, paired with Lair’s low frame rate during development, coupled with the motion controls, rendered Lair almost unplayable (and even sickening) according to Helava. “Essentially what happened was if you were turning at full speed and you had perfect reactions and you tilt the controller flat the moment you saw an enemy on screen, the cone of your view would sweep past them. And you would not be able to target [them]. ... You literally cannot fix this by becoming a better player. ... You’re like, why are all these dragons so nauseating?

“I remember actually going between a lot of different flight games and recording all the different fields of view and talking about how small ours was compared to all this, how hard it was making it to have situational awareness and really to have good gameplay in general. But I don’t think that that fight ever got won.”

Eggebrecht defends the field of view in Lair, saying that after spending significant time adjusting and tweaking to determine a number that wasn’t making people sick, it ended up the same as it was for Rogue Squadron: 30 degrees.

“At the end of the day, the FOV was my call,” says Eggebrecht. “One of the frustrating things was with growing the team, that all of that inherent knowledge about flight games that I have and the core team members from the Rogue Squadron days have, was not existent in those guys. ... I partially blame myself that I didn’t take a firmer step there and just say, ‘Look guys, we already figured this one out. Can we please move on and make a better game? At the end of the day, it was a waste of time.’”

Inside Factor 5

Even outside of disagreements over motion controls, the atmosphere at Factor 5 varied, based on accounts. Mathur, who worked at the studio from the days of Rogue Squadron, says that the team “celebrated life together.” The studio kitchen had a keg and the team often gathered around after five o’clock to drink.

“We were right in Marin. That area looks like the rolling hills from Naboo. Those green, grassy hills. ... We had these wild turkeys in the back. We’d go and have smoke breaks in nature,” says Wilhelm.

With two decades of development prior to Lair, Factor 5 housed strong talent. Speaking for this story, multiple team members referenced Factor 5’s technical attributes and collection of developers. “They were as good or better than any programmers I’ve ever worked with. They had this crew of guys from back in olden times in Factor 5, a couple of German guys, and they were just amazing,” says Spataro.

“They’re the best I’ve ever worked with, for sure,” adds Cohen.

“It was an amazing group, including several of the most talented devs I’ve ever worked with. Incredible technical depth in the art, animation, design and, of course, engineering groups. Generally just really cool people,” says designer Joe Pinney.

The interviewed team members continually spoke of working for Julian Eggebrecht specifically, often without prompting. During development for Lair, Eggebrecht went through personal problems, including a divorce and ensuing custody battle, and felt a waning interest in Lair. Many found Eggebrecht difficult to work with.

After 11 months on the team, Joe Pinney quit because of Eggebrecht, and says, “[Eggebrecht] occasionally lost his temper and verbally abused other people. It wasn’t a healthy place to work.”

Eggebrecht acknowledges his own frustrations and loss of temper. “I was trying to desperately rally the mission design team at the time around the vision I had in my head,” he says. “I got extremely frustrated relatively early on because, unfortunately, the guys weren’t getting it. That, of course, led to the designer churn. It wasn’t an ongoing thing or anything. There were definitely one or two meetings where I lost my temper simply out of the frustration.”

Some team members found the management situation hostile. The heads of specific departments frequently found themselves overridden. Cohen recalls an incident where Eggebrecht went over the art department’s head and wanted the color of water changed. Later, according to Cohen, the art department lead didn’t understand the decision or why he wasn’t consulted first.

“That is not a good way to manage teams,” says Cohen. “A lot of people, especially managers and stuff, were quitting. They’re like, ‘I can’t do my job if suddenly the president of the company is going to come around and change what I’m trying to work on as an art director.’”

“Julian knew how to run a company in a particular way and I think that that didn’t scale to the size of the problem.”

“Jim Cameron also changes the color of his water himself. Sue me,” says Eggebrecht, while laughing at his comparison. “Sometimes people don’t get it, why I care about it. On some of the visuals, for example, I have very strong opinions. I take full credit for the fact that the Factor 5 games, every single time, despite having had multiple art directors and everything, every one of our games, aside from technical excellence, everyone said the graphics were stunning. Quite frankly that’s because A, we had a fantastic art staff all the time and B, because I tend to micromanage art. I simply do it to this day.”

“Having to describe the structure would be like, head of art, Julian. Head of design, Julian. Head of programming, Julian. Head of production, Julian. When he wanted something, he would fight for it until he got it. [But] I think he treated me pretty well as an employee, so I have no complaints there,” says Dubrofsky.

Some team members felt empathy for Eggebrecht’s situation. Lair’s rocky development and growing pressure from Sony to reach an intended launch day release date meant Eggebrecht, plus the studio he co-founded, received the brunt of the impact.

“Julian knew how to run a company in a particular way and I think that that didn’t scale to the size of the problem you had when you have a PS3 game,” says Helava.

Into 2006

While Lair’s development process endured bumps, Animal Wars continued through development with a small team, for a period. The idea of animals shooting other animals in the tactical war setting, combined with blood and a dark tone, eventually turned Sony’s marketing team away. In August of 2006, Sony canceled Animal Wars. The staff was laid off, along with some Lair team members, in an attempt to control costs. The PlayStation 3 launch date release became increasingly infeasible.

Level designer Spataro came on around that time. “When I got there, [Lair] was in pretty bad shape,” he says. “There weren’t a lot of levels that were playable from beginning to end. The tools that we were using to build levels were not functional.”

“The producer was talking to us like we only got two months before we’re supposed to be out. ... It sounded kind of deluded,” says Dubrofsky.

Eggebrecht admits Lair wasn’t happening on the original schedule. “We didn’t even have a game at the time,” he says. “I don’t think we had anything, let alone anything that was polished.”

Part of the problem emanated from Lair’s new tools, in particular the level design tools. Those who worked on it describe a clunky process to make simple changes, assuming it worked at all.

“I had one week where the game would crash immediately when you started,” says Spataro. “Sometimes, in order to keep working, I worked on two levels. I would switch to my other level and maybe that one wasn’t crashing. ... I would send emails to the producers and engineers and say, ‘I’m sort of blocked. My level won’t start.’ It could be like a week before that was fixed.”

Enter Andy Vella.

“That kid rewrote the whole level editor by himself. He implemented all of the features we wanted and more. He’s like the secret hero that allowed the game to ship at all,” says Spataro.

“[Spataro] likes to exaggerate. I won’t claim to take full credit for that statement,” says Vella.

Fresh out of game school Digipen, Vella also came on to Factor 5 under the assumption Lair was close to completion, ready to make its debut as a PlayStation 3 launch title, about six months away when he joined.

Once on the team, Vella discovered the actual condition. “When I [got] there, there [was] a list of hundreds of items on the backlog of bugs with the tool, or small feature requests, or big feature requests. For whatever reason, it seemed very slow to get any of that stuff done. With my experience at Digipen, apparently it translated very well to come in and start fixing their problems.”

As for game design, Factor 5’s experience began to eat away at the foundation. Eggebrecht pushed for a design more akin to Rogue Squadron, something more familiar.

“He and the original guys in Factor 5, they knew that was successful and they tried to make everything like that. This was a different game and it needed something new and it needed something interesting. They kept tuning it that way and pretty soon we had the dragons going 600 mph, couldn’t see the environment, couldn’t really show off the PS3 capabilities,” says Spataro.

Frustrations began to boil over inside the studio. “Julian just wasn’t listening. He was the main one who wasn’t listening. And of course, he’s president so he could override anything you wanted. I place a lot of blame on him,” says Cohen.

In addition, Eggebrecht wanted Lair to support system features, like Remote Play for PSP. “New feature, let’s support it. It’s the old Factor 5 mantra,” says Eggebrecht.

“You’re crunching to death. You’re working all of these hours and you’re missing your deadlines. And then in addition to that, you’re being told to add these things in the game. It’s really frustrating because you’re just like, ‘I can’t work anymore’ and it’s like, ‘Why are we adding things? Why not make things fun that we already have?’” says Dubrofsky.

As development continued, Lair’s similarities to Factor 5’s other work started to become apparent to some team members. “We had a lot of potential but instead we made Rogue Squadron with dragons,” says Cohen.

Delay and launch

Lair missed its original release date in November 2006. It wasn’t ready. “The producer was talking to us like we only got two months before we’re supposed to be out. So we’re going to need you to work a lot harder and work more,” says Spataro.

Spataro describes Lair’s condition at that time. “I would say you could do some bare-bones stuff with the scripting and logic of the game. An example would be a lot of the dragons — they really didn’t have much AI going on, they were kind of flying off blind.”

“We might have had a few test levels,” adds Wilhelm.

After the delay, Lair spent an extra year in development, launching on Sept. 4, 2007. While working on reviews, members of the games press began contacting the studio asking about a traditional control scheme. Eggebrecht recalls the frustrations.

“The whole disaster could have been avoided. Within one day we had the patch ready because we only had to activate it. We begged Sony: ‘Don’t make the mistake. This is going to go terribly wrong. If every single publication right now is telling us they they have to throw us under the bus and that this is terrible, please, do this.’ Sony said ‘no.’”

[We made multiple attempts to reach members on Sony’s side for this story. None that we contacted were willing to speak.]

The reviews arrived as Eggebrecht expected. Dubrofsky saw them coming, too: “There is no surprise in my mind for me and the people I was closest with that the game wasn’t going to do well. ‘What do you think the review scores are going to be?’ And some people are like ‘80.’ I was like, ‘Are you crazy? We’re going to get, like, a 60!’” Dubrofsky wasn’t far off. Lair’s Metacritic score settled at 53.

Following the media response, Sony’s marketing department took the unusual approach of sending out a full-color reviewer’s guide — after the reviews were published. The 21-page magazine-like guide covered basics, including controls, while featuring various production art images, screenshots and story explanations. Eggebrecht wrote a small paragraph on the opening page and in a large font included, “Open your mind and your hands for something very different!” Multiple sites outright mocked the reviewer’s guide and asked why Sony bothered.

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“That’s like when your weird uncle shows up to like your graduation party. We were so cringing about [the reviewer’s guide],” says Wilhelm.

“[The reviewer’s guide] was in this whole quagmire of us trying to push the patch out whereas Sony marketing’s reaction to the whole thing was, ‘No, let’s not do it with a patch and admit that something is wrong. Let’s teach these folks how to really play it,’ which of course probably backfired 20 times over,” says Eggebrecht.

Lair eventually received the analog control scheme via a post-launch patch, along with a smattering of free content, including additional dragons. However, that download did not become available until April 2008, seven months after release.

Post-launch

Lair did not kill Factor 5. While the game’s troubled production did end Factor 5’s exclusivity deal with Sony, Eggebrecht claims the game eventually turned a profit.

Meanwhile, the studio fished for other projects, even trying to rekindle its relationship with LucasArts, taking the work done on the Rogue Squadron Xbox compilation and starting to port that to Wii (“still the best game we ever did,” says Eggebrecht regarding that Wii port). Factor 5 also attempted to court Nintendo with a Pilotwings clone called We Fly and even pitched a Kid Icarus update. None of these projects saw completion, nor did an attempted 3D reboot of Turrican that made it into the prototype stage.

Entering into a deal with publisher Brash Games, the studio began developing a game based on a proposed sequel to Bryan Singer’s film Superman Returns. Brash closed due to financial problems, and Singer’s movie never saw release.

That, and not having a backup, killed Factor 5 as most knew it.

In the ensuing chaos, litigation followed. Employees sued Factor 5 for unpaid labor, and when that was settled, the core team of Factor 5 reassembled.

“I was in the bad spot of having an unhealthy ego at the time ... I’m probably the most to blame”

Today, Factor 5 works on streaming services for game consoles, and it began with Netflix. “Afterward we spread out and we worked with Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, Crunchyroll, anybody under the sun, really,” says Eggebrecht. We’re the go-to guys when it [comes] to, ‘We want to get our streaming service and our UX into so and so platforms.’ That’s kind of the story of the team. We’re all still together.”

Looking back on Lair, some team members speak positively on their experience. For being his first project out of Digipen, Vella felt positive about Factor 5. “There were certainly challenges, but most people there were pretty happy doing what they were doing,” he says. “At least that was my perception. I was also a younger guy at the time and I loved my experience at Factor 5. I was pretty proud of what we built on that game.”

“It was an amazing group, including several of the most talented devs I’ve ever worked with. Incredible technical depth in the art, animation, design and, of course, engineering groups. Generally just really cool people,” says Pinney.

“I could rattle off names of all of these amazing people. I learned so much from them. It’s crazy that somehow, with all of that great talent, we couldn’t make something that was focused. It was just too scattered,” says Spataro.

“I was in the bad spot of having an unhealthy ego at the time as well as my personal stuff going on at the time, so I’m probably the most to blame because I’m also the director,” says Eggebrecht, who ended up behind a saga of game development, turmoil, internal politics and at the head of a once-small game studio burned by ambition.