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The Rise And Fall of Ion Storm
fakeamerican writes: "Here's a lengthy article in Salon about Ion Storm's rise and fall, written by a former employee and lifelong friend of John Romero." Shows what goofing off in class can getcha.
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For those junkbuster users out there, like me, that get nothing but a blank page when clicking on that link, this link willget you past the ad:
s torm/index.html?x
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/01/02/ion_
What's most ironic about the Daikatana fiasco, the millions spent, egos dissolved, and promises broken, is that the game's title is an *egregious* mistranslation of a Japanese word.
Basically, the designers erroneously believed that the characters for "big" (dai) and "sword" (katana), when slapped together, are pronounced "Daikatana." That's lunacy: this combination would be pronounced "Ogatana," (with an elongated "o.")
It gets worse. Daikatana, or Ogatana, don't exist as accepted descriptions of famous swords in Japanese. The best translation would be Tachi (using the characters for "fat' and 'sword,') but a preferred way of referring to a famous sword is just that: "Meiken," or famous sword.
If the Daikatana team had looked in the history books, or consulted a Japanese expert, they could have avoided this travesty, and dumped the tongue-twisting word "Daikatana" in the rubbish heap. A small investment for quality. But I suppose that hubris had already instilled itself in their minds.
Hubris. That's a Greek word, by the way. As in "classical Greek." Its roots are . . . (continue ad infinitum).
Yes he did leave after the original Quake. The lead designer for Quake II was Kevin Cloud I believe. He is an artist along with Adrian Carmack. The two of them made founded id software with John Romero and John Carmack.
From the article:
>But with great success came great antipathy, not just for John, but also for many of his
>employees.
The employees did sort of get a raw deal by association, but to ascribe all of the antipathy towards Romero to jealousy is really missing the point.
>Daikatana and Deus Ex were finally released in 2000. Predictably, Daikatana was slammed while
>Deus Ex received many awards. Both made money for Eidos
Deus Ex made money. Daikatana lost an immense amount of money. We followed the PC-Data sales numbers for a little while, and it was really, really grim. It might have made a comback when it went to the bargain bin, but even if it had turned into the best selling game of the year, it wouldn't have covered the sunk costs at Ion.
My view:
Ion storm failued due to lack of focus, which came from the top. They had some great employees (we hired some of them!), but games don't get done without someone in a position of authority forcing everything together. Romero's primary mistake was believing that abstract creative design was a primary, or even significant, part of a successful game. The "strategic creativity" in a game is less than 1% of the effort, and if you put that on a pedestal, you will deephasise where all the real work needs to be done.
I think Romero has a chance at a comeback with his current foray into handheld games. I don't think he ever lost the enthusiasm for games, but if he can recapture the personal work ethic that he had early on, he can probably still do some pretty cool things.
John Carmack
Nope...from id's own page:
id unofficially started in September of 1990 when John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, John Romero, and Tom Hall created the first game in the Commander Keen series, Invasion of the Vorticons. One month after Commander Keen was released into shareware, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, and John Romero left their jobs at Softdisk Publishing and officially began id Software, on February 1, 1991.
//m
Let's make that statement both more impressive and true, all at the same time. How about "Valve was able to pull off Half-Life by starting with the original Quake I engine"? Half-Life was not based on Quake 2. There's no way it could've been (the two were released too close together for Valve to have had time to modify the Q2 engine). Valve did have a license to some of the Q2 code, and thus brought some of that into their engine, but the majority of the code began life as Quake 1. Just to prove my point, here is a quote from id's Technology Licensing Program:
There are so many reasons why ION died, you can't attribute it to one thing. For one, Daikatana was terrible. Utterly dire, and I'm not just following common opinion, I had to review the thing and complete it. The game was abysmal and would have been far better, maybe even *gasp* playable, if they had done the following:
:)
- Stopped doors killing your sidekicks
- Stopped sidekicks shooting you
- Removed the stupid tiny robo-bugs at the start
- Removed the overkill "top slot" weapons (which 90% of the time killed you too) or make you invulnerable to your own shots
- Muted the stupid friggin' sidekicks, or at least re-record them with decent voice actors.
- Removed the stupid and out of place save gem system
That would only have gone half way to making the side kicks useful though - every reviewer I know, including me, just told them to stay put at the start of the level, completed the level, then dragged them to the exit. They were just such a stupidly ill-conceived idea from the start. If you're doing sidekicks, make them invulnerable or expendable, not a liability.
The hugely ambitious and overstretched development cycle didn't help either, people were sick of hearing about it by the time it finally came out, but the core of the problem was the above fundamental flaws in the game. I'm just stunned that they failed to spot and fix these hair tearingly annoying features. Romero was just given free rein to throw in a stupid amount of content (pointlessly - it would have been no better or worse with half the number of guns, levels or monsters). I'm sure in his pride he wilfully ignored the criticisms of the game too (as outlined above). It was a disaster waiting to happen. Even the excellent Deus Ex and Anachronox couldn't save ION Dallas (though Warren Spector and ION Austin still exist, thank goodness - eagerly anticipating Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3). Still, at least the games industry got this wake up call early, we shouldn't be seeing such blindly big spends again any time soon.
In response to your question about Third Law, they are a games company formed largely from Ex-ION people who walked. Their first game was KISS: Psycho Circus (yes, as in the band, not as corny as it sounds though) which was a competent, decent enough shooter with some nice ideas, certainly a lot better than Daikatana. I think one of the guys who left said to Romero "you can't polish a turd" in response to a comment from Romero. Love that quote.
-icemind
And here's more about the Third Law drama (Third Law Interactive was the company they went off to start).
Tell that to Bungie who had to rape the original idea of what Halo was intended to be to fit Microsoft's plans and have it be yet another FPS game.
For some reason this idea that Microsoft imposed by fiat radical gameplay changes on Halo keeps coming up here. At the risk of repeating myself... there's really just not a lot of evidence for the theory. Rumors of a change from 3rd-person to 1st-person perspective in Halo predated the Microsoft buyout by at least three months, and the basic storyline and gameplay mechanics of Halo appear to be largely unchanged since the E3 2000 demos. (Inasmuch as we knew what they were even then -- Bungie was smart enough to play it very close to the hip to give themselves room to work out playability issues as development progressed.)
Obviously, internet multiplayer went out the window when Halo moved to the XBox, but Bungie apparently felt that was a reasonable sacrifice to make in return for being given several metric tons of cash and a guaranteed audience of millions for their flagship game. Can't say I blame em for that choice.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.