"I wasn't excited about this Area 51 game," he said. While making the game, Smith was overseeing two projects, and Area 51 was not his favorite. That didn't help, and he accepts some fault. "We got hammered so hard, and we deserved it."

"Everyone was forced to share tech. It took eight months to get one thing working." He wouldn't specify what that one thing was, but did note that technical problems set the team back, time and time again. Another of Smith's complaints was "the fact that we had four days to orange box something," meaning to fix and polish a level. Smith called this "completely reprehensible."

"With a year to go, the game was disastrously off rails." There were long delays just getting Blacksite playable, and once it was he says, "it went straight from alpha to final."

Midway has confirmed to 1UP that Harvey Smith, Lead Designer of BlackSite: Area 51, has officially left the company. The news comes directly after widely circulated commentary from Smith critiquing his most recent project (read: stating "the project was so f***ed up") during a surprisingly honest postmortem discussion in Montreal