Recently, a former Rockstar environment artist shared his memories of working on Bully in an interview with Retro Gamer. Creating a "school GTA" became a serious test for the team.
Andrew Wood said that there were serious crunches (overtime; in general, this is typical for studio games). For him, memories of work are a mixture of love and hate:
"It was a fun, weird, hellish, chaotic, amazing time. I fondly remember the people, those times and the crazy things we did after work, but then I think about the stress."
There were "constant internal conflicts in the team due to constant work stress" - several developers even had nervous breakdowns, but Andrew held on:
"It was difficult to work in such an environment, but I knew that Bully was worth it, so I endured."
At the end of Bully's development, we had to work "seven days a week, an average of 18 hours a day", which exhausted people. This led to a large turnover, but he decided to stay because he knew that the project "would be special".