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.

Comments

They should have called it "meiken."

[Rank Amateur]

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).

Re:They should have called it "meiken."

[MrResistor]

Whether it's a real japanese word or not, it's been floating around in gaming circles for a long time, from D&D to Daggerfall to the game in question, and undoubtably many stops in between. In every case it has meant, simply, "big sword", sort of a Claymore Katana, rather than some specific sword of legend as you seem to suggest it should.

The meanings of characters when slapped together, is largely dependent on context, though, so I'd say you've got a bit of hubris yourself declaring the word invalid, at least by the somewhat fractured arguements you present. I won't argue pronunciation since I don't speak Japanese, but my wife's boss is Japanese and she's frequently approached by people who want Kanji Tattoos. She says it's tricky business weighing all the possible alternate meanings against the intended one and picking the combination that is best overall.

Re:Romero left after Quake2?

[Judas96']

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.

Comments

[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