How Accurate is Team Bondi's Los Angeles in LA Noire?

Even at a casual glance, one can tell that Team Bondi put an extreme amount of effort into making the Los Angeles that is portrayed in L.A. Noire as authentic as possible. What you may not realize, however, is how far they really went in order to get the look just right. With other titles produced by Rockstar, such as the Grand Theft Auto series or Red Dead Redemption, the designers took locations and period accurate details from media such as magazines and movies to make an environment that looked right, but some of the specifics were still off. For instance, with Grand Theft Auto 4, one can tell that the game is based on New York, but in the end Liberty City is not an accurate portrayal, since many of the landmarks don't quite line up properly to their real life counterparts.

Rather than simply cobble together several photos from around the time period, Team Bondi went to the UCLA Department of Geography and used aerial photographs by photographer Robert Spence as their blueprint. Back in the 1940s, Spence flew over Los Angeles with a 46 pound camera, since many big shots in Hollywood would pay a good deal of money for photographs of their houses. As a result, many of these photographs proved to be invaluable to Team Bondi. They provided not only famous landmarks, but helped them to better understand the trolley system, traffic patterns, and construction methods of the time, to name a few. Because of these photographs, Team Bondi has been able to produce the most authentic recreation of 1940s Los Angeles to date. Check out a side by side comparison between real-life Los Angeles photographs and L.A. Noire screenshots below.