Looking Back at LA Noire, Rockstar's Cinematic Detective Drama

When it swaggered onto consoles in 2011, LA Noire arrived with unprecedented cinematic ambition. Seven years in the making, Rockstar's detective drama was one of the most expensive games ever created, backed by an investment large enough to fund a modest movie. The project featured a cast of 400 actors, with every nuance of their performances captured by 32 cameras using the MotionScan technology previously utilized in blockbuster films like Avatar and The Lord of the Rings. Pitched as a cross between LA Confidential and Grand Theft Auto, the game cast professional actors, including numerous stars from Mad Men, most notably Aaron Staton as protagonist Cole Phelps.

The headline feature of the title relied on these realistic facial performances to drive its interrogation mechanic, where players were meant to distinguish truth from falsehood based on physical ticks and expressions. However, despite the expensive technology behind it, telling a guilty smirk from a subtle smile often proved impossible in practice. During development, the original Truth, Doubt, and Lie options were tested as Coax, Force, and Accuse, and later modified in the 2017 remaster to Good Cop, Bad Cop, and Accuse to make them more context-appropriate. Even the game's lead actor struggled with the system; Aaron Staton revealed in a 2017 interview with GQ that he was terrible at playing the game himself, despite having read 5,000 pages of script.

While the interrogations drew much of the attention, the crime scene investigations formed the superior element of the experience. Rather than relying on supernatural senses, players engaged in tactile forensic examination, guided through crime scenes by musical cues woven into the soundtrack. Players could pick up and manipulate items to uncover vital leads, though these scenes were also filled with incidental junk that added a meticulous counterpoint to the police work. Surrounded by a painstaking reproduction of 1940s Los Angeles covering eight square miles, the game included 95 period-correct automobiles and collectibles, though many open-world elements ultimately felt superfluous to the core narrative experience.