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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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The article took five pages without going into much relevant detail.
At the end, he tells us that Daikatana flopped and Deus Ex was awesome, but fails to say why.
Deus Ex was an awesome game. I think that the first person shooter has a tremendous amount of potential to surpass its origins, and Deus Ex is a glimpse into the beginnings of that future.
Sorry - The company that got the funding that could have gone to Looking Glass - Which made the *BEST* ever first person shooter, 'Thief', deserves none.
But that's a nice long torrid soap opera in itself. And yes, they got the money because one team had a 'superstar', and the other dev team didn't.
I perfer the one that actually shipped some incredible games which pushed the FPS genre to its limits, thanks.
Speaking of which, Brian Goble and Jason Hall of Monolith were equally as nice. I e-mailed them to ask how they first got involved with Microsoft and they told me it was by sending them a demo CD of their work. Then they asked for my address and mailed a copy of the CD directly to my home. WOW...
And by the way, I'm not even a level designer, I'm a "writer", so none of the shit that came out of there is my fault, it was all those other bitches, because while they were obviously slacking by playing other people's games, I was slacking more subtly by working on my Great American Novel, or bidding on Call of Cthulhu rulebooks on eBay.
It's been said before and I'll say it again. Shit never, ever sticks to the "creative" guys. By the way, when a games person says they worked on a title "briefly" (Deus Ex in this case), it means they walked past a room when the producers were being lied to about it a couple of times. Believe me, I know.
Let me recall an anecdote about Daikatana. A games magazine was invited to view it a couple of months before release (I don't know which "release" that referred to). The mag flack played for a bit then asked "Where's the sniper rifle?"
"Sniper rifle?" asked the Ion Storm "creatives".
The mag flack explained it, pointing out that every FPS had one. It was a genre convention. The answer from the Ion Storm guys:
"Wow, that sounds cool. We'd better put one in."
Jesus H Breakdancing Christ. Ill informed, incompetent, and unprincipled. They could at least have stuck to their guns (literally) rather than throwing yet another new challenge at the programming team with a deadline looming. It really is astonishing that it turned out as good (ahem) as it did.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I kept reading, waiting for anything insightful in the five pages worth of descriptive melodrama, and came up empty.
As a programmer in the game industry, I've had many friends work at Ion Austin over the years and all of them think very, very highly of Warren Spector. I'm really glad they have proven to be capable under his leadership.
What I really disliked about Ion Dallas and John Romero's public image was the inherent cheapness. I liken it to a trailer trash lottery winner, embarassing everyone else in the industry with his grand standing. Sadly, Mr. Romero may be a fantastic designer, but all Ion Storm proved was his inability to run a company. There are some people who can do both, and he's not one of them.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
As this story illustrates, Romero thought he could hire anyone who might remotely fit into the company. He wasn't interested in building a successful business: he was interested in building a company that was fun go to every day. But despite his puerile, myopic goals, he was given an outrageous amount of resources.
In short, the existence of Ion Storm exemplifies the core philosophical flaws that led to the bursting of the "internet bubble." Companies like Eidos appropriated funds on the basis of hype rather than sound business ideas. By any objective standards, Eidos, John Romero and Ion Storm deserved to fail at every level.
I have to admit, lack of top-down leadership seems plausible. How else can you explain Half-Life being so good, and Daikatana being so bad? Same basic engine, but one lacked the ability to pull off the added extras.
Still, there's a great book to be written on game design theory, from concept to box. I'd love to see some insight into id, which seems to have done well from shareware like Commander Keen all the way into the present, vs. the other teams that didn't quite make it. I'd love to hear what happened at Origin after Ultima 7. Anyone else have favorite untold game design stories?
In my line of work, the boss has a saying - There's a time to shoot the engineer and ship the thing. Maybe in game design, there's a time to shoot the designers and let the programmers get it right.
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!"
He's not saying they were right; he freely admits to the mistaks they made. However, that's not the point. He's saying they were a bunch of people who genuinely had their hearts in the right place who were trying to create something special, a really great game that pushed the boundaries.
They failed of course, and he readily admits that too, but the point is that the public beating they took was way out of line with what they are. I mean, the public tore into them with a wrath usually reserved for child molesters and genocidal dictators. He makes some interesting points about how the public and media like to build people up only to destroy them, and notes the ways in which Ion Storm fueled the media frenzy (the "make you his bitch" ads, marketing outpacing development, etc).
Think about it, lots of companies make shitty games, outlandish advertising promises ("this game will kick your ass", etc) and have lots of petty infighting. The question is: why was this such a big deal with Ion Storm? The difference lies mostly in the public's opinions, expectations and attitudes, rather than any actual fault of Romero or Ion Storm's own.
I met John Romero at E3 '98. He was very friendly and was eager to show us the cool new robot-infested levels they'd made for Daikatana... and they did look pretty cool, I admit (for the time). He was a nice guy and although Daikatana wound up sucking (although it probably would have been cool if it wasn't late), he didn't really deserve the public beating he took.
Also, note that during all the public sniping, John never took the oppurtunity to trash anyone or fire back (to my knowledge). You have to give him credit for that. Most people, probably myself included, would have been hard-pressed to take the high road in that situation like he did.
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>Ion storm failued due to lack of focus, which came from the top.
As someone who knows firsthand, I just have to say that John couldn't be more correct on that point.
After devoting nearly every waking hour of my life to Daikatana for a year and a half I found that in the end it's goes nowhere if the effort was not applied toward a consistent goal.
Imagine a single point with hundreds of random vectors originating from it. Add them together and they essentially cancel one another out.
That point is Daikatana and those vectors represent the effort myself and others put into it over several years.
Direction is important.
And to maintain direction, you need focus. And that, truly, is what Ion lacked.
Jonathan E. Wright
> Clever design + bad dev team = Deer Hunter, so there is an argument to be made for both sides
That is a really good example. I might quibble that that was market creativity, rather than game design creativity, but it is still a good point.
John Carmack