Lanning described Munch's Oddysee as the project that has him the least satisfied. He took responsibility for the game's faults in acknowledging that he was immature, couldn't handle the pressure that went with managing a larger group of 75 developers and was too over-demanding for what became unrealistic goals. Lanning later explained in 2006 that video game developers were being held back creatively by the race to develop newer technologies, a fact that affected the production of Munch because of the change from 2D to 3D that was demanded by the market of the new Xbox.
The team working on Munch's Oddysee was the same team that produced Abe's Oddysee and Exoddus, and thus they had no experience in 3D game development. In the case of the 2D Abe games, the backgrounds were paintings processed into sprites, pre-rendered and photo retouched, allowing them to add much more detail that wasn't possible in the 3D environment of Munch's Oddysee. Three months from release, the team realised that development was not going to be complete in time, so "four or five" new programmers were brought in and replaced most of the development team, who re-wrote the entire game in nine months.