Slashdot Mirror
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.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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.
>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