Harvey Smith, a designer who worked on Blacksite: Area 51 spoke candidly with GameLife about some of the issues that led to the game's middling reviews:

"This project was so fucked up," said Smith, by way of explanation.

Smith spent the last few minutes of his speech on a postmortem of the game. In part, he blames himself for Blacksite's less-than-warm critical reception.

At first, the game just didn't intrigue Smith. "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."

That lack of polish, of being able to sit with a final product and make sure it is up to the standards they wanted, was one of the biggest problems for Blacksite and for Smith. "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."

While I certainly appreciate hearing about these issues first-hand from the developer, you've got to imagine poor Harvey'll be getting a call from Midway's PR department.