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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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Well, it's almost that simple. The 'team' you're given in Daikatana is probably the reason the game does so badly. IIRC, you couldn't let any member of the team die... you couldn't shoot through them, ala 'No Friendly Fire' in most FPS arenas today... you had to make allowances for the idiot AI behind your team members... you frequently got stuck because your 'teammates' couldn't get out of your way.
More than anything else, reviews of the crappy team system killed Daikatana's sales, and with Daikatana, Ion Storm failed as well.
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FYI, Warren Spector's (*humble bow*) Austin branch of Ion Storm is alive and well. So don't fear, Deus Ex 2 is still churning.
Deus Ex, of course, is the reason Ion Storm Austin is in business. I'm sure you know why the other branch is closed.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The article says, in summary, "Ion Storm was a great place to work, and everything was good, until people started attacking them, and then it all went to crap."
Which is, well, debatable. I mean, Daikatana didn't get bad reviews because people wanted to slam Ion Storm; it got bad reviews because it bit. If it had been good, it would've gotten good reviews, regardless of people's like or dislike of Ion Storm. They overreached and failed, end of story.
Of course, my personal dislike of Ion Storm comes from the (admittedly irrational) belief that the money Eidos gave for Daikatana would've been much better spent on Looking Glass Studios.
One thing the article alludes to that I can definitely corroborate is that John Romero has always been tremendously approachable and friendly to fellow gamers. He has never failed to respond to an e-mail I've sent him and will cc: just about anyone in the game industry to answer a question if he doesn't have one. He's sent me copies of his old Apple games on request and provided all kinds of info on old games, history, trivia. When he says "I'll check my old diskettes and send you an e-mail when I get home from work" he does, no exceptions. I'm not even in the media -- I just like games!
In some ways the Ion Storm / John Romero situation reminds me a bit of the Microsoft / Bill Gates situation. While many people hate Microsoft and make Bill Gates the butt of every joke, very few people who know him ever call his character into question. While the very mention of Ion Storm and John Romero make some people hopping mad, very few people who have met John hold him in such disregard. Maybe people need to make a better distinction between a "company" and a "person." They aren't the same thing.
Dead on. The story is laughable, and sad. Supposedly he's defending Ion Storm against the critics, but all his defenses amount to are saying "oh, yes, it was like that, but it was cool!" The wastefulness of that kind of culture came from having a bunch of young fanboys who were so impervious to criticism, so sure that they couldn't do anything wrong, that they squandered every break they got and won few friends along the way. The fact that a childhood friend of Romero's had to right this content-free apologia is an indication of how hopeless they really were.
One thing that I really question from the article is this statement: Daikatana and Deus Ex were finally released in 2000. Predictably, Daikatana was slammed while Deus Ex received many awards. Both made money for Eidos, but the walk-outs, firings, lawsuits and general bad blood doomed Ion Storm..
To say that I highly doubt that Diakatana "made money" is an understatement (note that "made money" means returned more money than it cost to produce. Eidos isn't sitting pretty if they dumped millions in and "made money" selling 20 copies).
I believe it was Carmack that made the observation that, "I can write software on a computer set on a cheap desk just as well as one set on an expensive desk." (I'm sure its not an exact quote, but the this is the gist of what he said.) As I have been going through negotiations to spin off a product from my current employer into another company run by a few of us employees, this type of wisdom was really needed. All the engineers are for renting a hole-in-the-wall and putting banquet tables in the cubicles, and the marketing person wants to rent a posh execuive office suite. Nevermind that our clients would never come to visit us or that we can't afford to employee anyone at a market wage. I'm sure she didn't read the story, even though I sent the URL.
I think the bottom line is that software's largest cost is labor, and it should remain the largest cost. Making the company support the lifestyle of the employees or the partners is a mistake.
Misleading at best! Daikatana 'made money' in the sense that some copies were, in fact, sold, but you also need to consider how much was SPENT in the making...
I envisioned the apocalyptic San Francisco as a psychedelic wasteland. But I learned how valuable my ideas were when I excitedly approached a designer about making a psychedelic level in Haight/Ashbury. "Yeah, man, sure, that's gay," was his arctic response.
So, is the designer just the typical moronic FPS-playing homophobe, or is he positively affirming San Francisco demographics? The mind reels...
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:
Yeah! If it weren't for those damned ads, we could be absolutely positive that they make no money off of their efforts! How dare they try and stop us from viewing their work without making the slight effort of reading their ads! They are infringing on my rights as a consumer to not only receive completely free news, but to take active measures to make sure that the publisher gets paid precisely dick for their efforts! Those bastards!
To elaborate a bit:
Probably everyone reading this has done some "game design" while talking with friends. In an evening, you can lay out the basic character of a game -- what the player does, what the environments are like, what the obstacles are, what the tools in the game are like, what the plot is, what the style of the game is, and a few unique hooks for the game.
There is not a hell of a lot of difference between what the best designer in the world produces, and what a quite a few reasonably clued in players would produce at this point. This is the "abstract creativity" aspect. This part just isn't all that valuable. Not worthless, but it isn't the thing to wrap a company around.
The real value in design is the give and take during implementation and testing. It isn't the couple dozen decisions made at the start, it is the thousands of little decisions made as the product is being brought to life, and constantly modified as things evolve around it. If you took two game designs, one good and one bad, and gave them to two development teams, one good and one bad, the good dev team could make a good, fun product out of a bad design, but the bad dev team could ruin the most clever design. The focus should be on the development process, not the (initial) design.
The games with 500 page design documents before any implementation are also kidding themselves, because you can't make all the detail decisions without actually experiencing a lot of the interactions.
Putting creativity on a pedestal can also be an excuse for laziness. There is a lot of cultural belief that creativity comes from inspiration, and can't be rushed. Not true. Inspiration is just your subconscious putting things together, and that can be made into an active process with a little introspection.
Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.
John Carmack
>>Truly inovative games will always sell well. Look at max payne. I was really pissed that it was not first person view, but after getting around the feel, the game was damn near perfect.
Tell that to the developers who go out and try to make anything other than yet another FPS or RTS and go bankrupt because they either sell poorly, or the publisher wants them to revamp the game to become more of the same.
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.
Tell that to any developer that has to fall back onto making more of the same in order to try and bankroll something truly original, just to have it die miserably because damn it, it's not another version of WarCraft/C&C/Quake/whatever.
And then you bring up Counterstrike which is just a variation on more of the same (HalfLife meets rainbow six). Way to bury your own argument there.
I've always been amazed by people's reaction to fame. Why was it so important for Carmack to waste his time signing your box? Why isn't it enough for you to just go up, say how much you enjoy his games, maybe shake his hand, and leave it at that? What is up with this autograph thing? Are you disappointed that you couldn't sell it or something?
I recall a quote by a famous author, I don't remember who it was or the quote, but it was something like, "Why must they pursue the author? Why aren't my works enough?"
Cut the guy some slack, and remember the celebrities are human.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
JC makes himself VERY accessible to the community. Not only in his
Celebrities give up a good measure of anominity and privacy, the same is true for the people that develop the games we play and lovel. I'd bet dimes on the dollar that JC (or any of the Id staff for that reason) probably can't go out to dinner without at least one person wanting to stop them to talk. It's alot of pressure to be under, so I wouldn't at all be surprised if he gets a little aggrivated now and then. Romero is known to be a very good natured, and accessible person, but do you think he doesn't get aggrivated at times and just wishes that people would leave him the heck alone? Of course he does, but him and JC are different people. They will react to different circumstances in different ways. Neither you, nor I have any qualification to say which is right or wrong until you walk the miles in their shoes
I've never met the man myself, but you've only met him once. Don't presume that can really sum him up by one short meeting in a crowded convention hall, where there is serious pressure to give attention to as many people as possible, which could be hundreds during events like that.
"I don't want to get locked into signing these all day"
Perhaps you failed to consider that maybe he simply didn't feel it would be fair to sign yours for you, and then ignore other people due to simple lack of time. It was very gracious of him to sign it for you, he would probably feel a bit guilty if he didn't sign something for everyone after that as a result.
TROLL MODE ON - in summary: Stop being a selfish and judgemental prick. You don't know anything about the guy.TROLL MODE OFF