My first job at Irrational Games was as Lead Artist on Freedom Force. We faced a lot of challenges right from the start. When I was hired there were only 2 other artists working on the project and neither of them had worked in games before. We were building our game from scratch, and even though we were building on top of the powerful Gamebryo Engine, there was no level editor or tools for us to import assets into the engine. I wrote allot of Max script and we leveraged Max to do a lot of things like level layout.
The best thing about Freedom Force were the amazing silver age comic character designs by Rob Waters.