I grabbed "Dirt 2" for the xbox 360 recently, looking for an accessible late-night gaming distraction from coding.

The game is a stunning technical achievement, and it is amazing what they squeeze out of the almost half-decade-old era hardware of the device.

What makes the game spectacular isn't specific to some mystical art of console gaming, however, but is simply great software design and execution. While many in "mainstream" development (business processes, websites, etc) consider game development foreign to what they do, it's all just algorithms and code: One person does financial projections and another does particle effects, differing less than many imagine

The game was so excellent that I decided that I'd try to find who the talent behind it was, my quest thwarted because this game, like many recent releases by large game studios, has an apparently anonymous development team. My search for credits has yielded only a listing of artists responsible for the songs in the game.

It would be great if there was an industry credits site similar to imdb, where you could find out the people responsible for games and applications: I can easily discover who did the foley mixer work on Joe Dirt, but can't discover the team behind Dirt 2 after a lot of digging. Maybe I'll make one.

I did find a "studio tour" video, in which the only person deemed worthy of naming was the "Senior Executive Producer". Maybe if I finish the game I'll discover who did the magic to make this game happen. I'd like to read how these guys operate and do what they do, because they are clearly successful at their craft, and I imagine they'd have interesting things to say.

Are they just cogs in the gears of CodeMasters? Crank it and a great game pops out, quality determined only by your Senior Executive Director in charge of North American Marketing?

Are we past the era of superstars like John Carmack? Are we into an era where everyone is nameless "team players"...unless of course they're in senior management/marketing, in which case their contributions and name will be heralded everywhere.

As a mostly unrelated aside, the "all contributors are equal, but some are more equal than others" policy reminds me of a conversation I once had with a peer, during which they bragged about how their workplace followed a policy that strongly discouraged fancy-pants work titles (e.g. no lead architect, senior developer, etc). My appreciation for that egalitarian workplace dissolved, however, when I learned that the speaker had granted themselves a lofty, important sounding title, as did the other senior members, and they failed to see the hypocrisy in it.

Sidenote: The website for the game is mildly offensive to Canadians. They decided that the landing page would require you to first select a country, with the options being the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Spain, the UK, Italy, France, and the USA.

As a Canadian I'm left not knowing which I'm supposed to pick. Maybe I'm supposed to pick the UK to get words with superfluous 'u' still intact. Maybe I'm supposed to pick the US just because of proximity? Two of those countries (the Netherlands and Belgium) are significantly smaller than Canada, so I have to guess it's a hybrid language/proximity thing.

Lots of websites pull this cheap navigation technique and it's lame. Often a US flag really means "English", other times a Union Jack means English. Nationality and language aren't the same thing, so it's a lazy tactic, made especially confusing when both appear together.

Then again, if I recall correctly the old Codemasters site worked by having you select on a world map, where all of North America was labeled "United States of America". Us Canadians get accustomed to it.