Imagine working on a blockbuster film for 2-1/2 years and then being left out of the movie's end credits. It's not likely to happen because union contracts dictate giving credit where credit is due.

Now imagine working on a hit video game for 2-1/2 years and no one -- not you, not anyone in your team of 55-plus developers -- appears in the credits.

Unfortunately, in an industry where this is not all that uncommon, where there are no unions, where there are few contracts, very little has been done to prevent it.

Until recently.

This coming February, at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, developers will be asked for their feedback on the beta version of a Game Crediting Guide developed by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and designed to give game makers "accurate, complete, and fair credits."

While no statistics exist that would quantify how frequently games go uncredited, or improperly credited, according to Jason Della Rocca, the IGDA's executive director, "anecdotally I can tell you that it happens all the time. One of the most extreme examples is what happened with Manhunt 2 where a publisher, Rockstar Games, literally pretended that the studio that made the game never existed. It's the perfect example for why this industry needs crediting standards."

Rockstar did not respond to multiple calls for comment.

Jurie Horneman was a producer at Rockstar Vienna (Austria), part of the team that reportedly created about two thirds of Manhunt 2, a single-player survival-horror game released on Oct. 31 for the PlayStation 2, Wii, and PSP.

The following day, Horneman recalls that he was angry to find that none of his 55-plus co-workers who worked on the game for 2-1/2 years -- from January 2004 until Rockstar closed down the studio on May 11, 2006 -- were listed in the credits.

In his personal blog, Horneman recalls that he was "disappointed and outraged that Rockstar Games tried to pretend that Rockstar Vienna and the work we did on Manhunt 2 never happened -- the work of over 50 people who put years of their lives into the project, trying to make the best game they could."

Horneman's blog also includes posted comments from other developers. Said one:

"Thank you for posting this. It's incidents like this that reinforce the argument that developers need a union that can ensure credits are published accurately. In our industry, careers can be made or broken with the flippant change of a game's credits, usually written by a producer with their own personal axes to grind. Almost every developer I know has a story like this, and it needs to stop."

Indeed, the Rockstar Vienna incident is par for the course in an industry where it is important for developers to establish a verifiable track record, explains the IGDA's Della Rocca.

"Developers are always moving from job to job," he says, "and if you tell your hiring manager how good you are, that you were the lead programmer on Project So-And-So, and then he goes to that game and you're not credited, how does he know you're not just smooth-talking him? Developers' careers depend on accurate crediting."

But, for game publishers, creating fair and accurate credits doesn't seem to be a priority.

"There are all sorts of reasons why credits can go wrong," says John Feil, the chair of the IGDA Credit Standards Committee and a game designer at Kirkland, Wash.-based Amaze Entertainment. "Sometimes it's the distracting effect of the crunch at the end of a project when your mind is elsewhere. Sometimes it's the strong bonding effect of trying to ship the game together, and anyone who may have left the team early and isn't there at the end is felt not to deserve credit. And sometimes it's just plain sloppiness. Upper management, who typically aren't developers, may not take credits seriously."