Lair Controls Work Eight out of 10 Times for Game’s Lead Director

Julian Eggebrecht should be pretty good at Lair. I mean after all, he is the lead director at developer Factor 5, and must have had plenty of practice playing the game. But when asked about what reviewers and gamers everywhere are claiming – that the game’s motion controls are unresponsive best – Eggebrecht said he was about to pull off the 180 maneuver “about eight [times] out of 10, which is the same ratio that I get in Wii Sports tennis when I try to do a backspin.”

Let’s stay on Lair. In other words, one out of every five times you try and pull off a fundamental move it simply doesn’t work? Doesn’t that seem like a failure to you as a developer?

But Eggebrecht had excuses for the game’s development, which he claims was haunted. “I am not a believer in ghosts, but this one was haunted,” he said in an interview with GameFile. After putting together a trailer for E3 2005 at the PlayStation 3’s unveiling, technical issues prevented the game from being shown.

“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,” he said. “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.”

GameFile via 1UP

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