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The Future of Gaming
nvembar writes: "The International Game Developers Association has the text of the lead designer at ION Storm, Harvey Smith's keynote address. In it he addresses "high fidelity similulations" entering games, making them more flexible and realistic. It's an interesting read on the future of gaming."
Haven't all their games flopped miserably despite all the hype?
No. Dominion3 failed utterly and completely, but then again it was just a failed game which ION bought the rights to when the previous developers went bankrupt. Diakatana failed miserably despite all the hype, time, and expense. Deux Ex did quite well and was critically hailed, earning many many "game of the year" honors, despite being not-so-hyped. Anachronox was apparently pretty run-of-the-mill, but it barely got any hype at all.
You, like many people, are unfairly painting all of ION Storm with the brush of Diakatana. Of course, John Romero--project leader for Diakatana (which was actually really called John Romero's Diakatana)--was the founder of ION Storm, and the reason ION got so much hype and publicity and money in the first place. And Diakatana was not just a flop but an apocalyptic fiasco: they plowed something like $50 million and 4 years (after promising it would only take 8 months) into a shockingly mediocre game, all whilst buying the top floors of a lavish skyscraper to serve as their development house, and even once causing their entire programming teams to resign en masse.
But Deus Ex was probably the best game of 2000. One reason for the diparity is that ION Storm actually had three completely seperate teams in seperate cities, so Deux Ex and Diakatana were really developed by the same company in name only.
Waren Spector is a very smart man, with many fine accomplishments to his credit. I'm not sure I'd go so far as "genius", but I'll grant that he has a good eye for successful games. I'm looking forward to his next projects quite eagerly.
That said, his involvement with the first Ultima Underworld game was quite small (Origin's liaison with Looking Glass), and his involvement with Thief, while not actually nil, was extremely close to it. And, of course, there were a lot of other people who helped make all these projects happen.
Warren's job includes talking to the press, so his name gets out there a lot, but if you actually pay attention to what he *says*, he's always trying to spread the credit around, because he *knows* that he tends to get way more than he deserves. To call Warren "THE genius behind" [emphasis mine] the games he worked on is both inaccurate, and an insult to the dozens of other brilliant people who contributed to those games.
Warren is certainly due a lot of credit. But you do him (and other readers) a disservice if you try and give him so much more credit than he is due.