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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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Here's a nice way to demonstrate the fall of Ion Storm.
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
"Yeah, we were as badly run as all our critics said, and it really was a huge waste of money, time and energy, but Goddamn, it was fun. I miss it. Won't someone give me a job doing the same thing?"
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
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.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The article states that Romero left id after Quake 2. If my memory serves me correctly, didn't he leave after the original Quake?
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_
Yeah, remember before they actually did anything.
The gaming mags jumped all over them and said they were the second coming... goes to show what they know about things.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.
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).
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.
I have to agree with what he said about the way FPS need to evolve, but it seems to me the way to do that is not with killer new technology, but better usage of what is out there. I've recently finished thief-2. I think the concept of you go toe to toe, you die lead a lot to the interest I had playing the game. Let's face, a real human is pretty easy to kill. If some one starts shooting at you, chances are it is already too late. A single bullet, arrow, what ever, takes you out. Oh sure, I love quake and rune as much as the next guy, but some how thief really grabbed my interest.
As I post this the majority of replies are below my (1) threshold. Guess angry feelings over ION storm still exist.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
I was disturbed by the hate and bitterness on the message boards.
Doesn't read Slashdot, does he?
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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.
"meiken" sounds like a shitty name for a videogame. "Daikatana" at least implies to the casual listener that a sword is involved.
I don't know what is more funny? But yes I will reply.
IT WAS A JOKE! I in fact am very white. But 1/4 is not.
It's like a pun, you know.
"Come to Cincinnati - You'll have a riot!"
Joke
Joke
Joke
Joke
Get your Unix fortune now!
No wonder it was so hard to find a job..
And here I thought it was just goofy Doom'ers on IRC that thought I was related..
Rick Romero
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
From the looks of Stevie "KillCreek" Case, she's been working in *cough* silicon valley quite a bit since hooking up with Romero...
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Ah, once more with the same tune: "everybody who was talking trash about Ion Storm just wishes they could have worked there!!!"
No.
I suggest that anybody who is actually interested in the reasons why Ion Storm became an industry synonym for mismanagement and failure dig up the original articles by BitchX and Flamethrower that started off the whole public meltdown. Ion Storm did not fail because people were jealous of how well John Romero treated his friends. Ion Storm failed because Romero, Porter and Hall were incompetant managers who treated their talented employees like dirt, and focussed on creating a cult of personality rather than actually completing a game.
Unfortunatly, as revisionist screeds like Divine's article prove, that cult of personality is Ion Storm Dallas' most lasting legacy, long out-living their forgettable games.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Reading that self-serving tripe was not anyfun; it was neither fun, not funny.
Let me summarize all 5 useless pages.
I knew Romero. He gave me a job. Everything you read was true but it was fun. Despite our best websurfing Ion Storm went under. I love John. I need a job.
I want my ten minuutes back.
This
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...
How can he babble on about distractions and such inside the company and fail to mention KillCreek's new breasts and their subsequent display (along with the rest of her body) in Playboy!?
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
I think Daikatana and Anachronox were massively ambitious games of the sort you can expect when designers are given free rein to be truly bold (see also Black and White). But as the first game the team had worked on together, for many the first they had worked on at all, it would have been difficult even without the political shenanigans. I think we've all heard about the Third Law incident, and let me remind you that there were a total of five lead programmers, the last of which (Shawn Green) being the only programmer to span the length of the project. For another thing, as you seem to have noticed, the programmer who was working on sidekick AI left six months before the game went gold...
It's sad, really. I always hate to see bad things happen to pretty girls like John Romero.
Actually, not many people seem to have heard of Anachronox, much less played through it. Of all the games I've played over the years, it has the absolute best storyline and plot I've EVER played! There was (suspossedly) something like an extra 4-6 HOURS of dialog cut from the game to make everything fit onto the two CD's. I'd pay money just to be able to read the script.
2 001/p2_03.html) (I don't follow awards anymore. There's one for EVERYTHING nowadays... "Best use of a red pushbutton in an elevator in a FPS centered in futuristic Chicago".. It's coming... we've got 'em for everything else)
Interesting to note, Anachronox has also won "Best Story Award" from Gamespot (http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/bestof_
Anyways, Anachronox was created using a heavily modified Quake2 engine. And, sadly enough, it seems that games tend to sell on pretty graphics, rather than gameplay.
Also, practically everybody I know that has played through Anachronox has agreed that it definatly ranks wayyy up there on their list of all time favorites. It definatly does mine. (and yes, I know quite a bit of people that have played it through)
Do yourself a favor -- go pick this game up. You'll be very glad you did.
--Xanlexian
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
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.
Killcreek, Before and After. Or: how a woman can succeed in the gaming industry -- a story in pictures.
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
You are free to view these advertisements as a travesty against all that you love, but I think you are overreacting just a bit. Have you noticed how many advertisements there are in an average magazine? Advertisement is the way that magazines make money. Salon may be published online but it is still a magazine. You implied that you had been a Salon reader in the past. If you like their articles, why don't you calm down a bit and just not let the ads bother you?
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
...didn't you hear? Design is law!
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Yeah, I remember waiting for it along with Unreal. (same timeframe I think).
Now, here's a challenge - how about:
LifeBane
Anyone remember that? It wasn't even a game, I don't think - a guy just started posting screenshots and messages about how the game was coming along or something - it had a number of the "waiting for Quake" crowd interested :-)
Or how about:
Into The Shadows
Had that impressive skeleton demo footage. Also came to nothing (they were writing it in assembler - is that the best choice for a game??)
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
John Romero Releases Details on Next Project: "John Romero Presents John Romero's 'John Romero'"
"He was a wise man who invented beer." -- Plato
I worked in the same building for a time. The law office I worked for was on the 49th floor, at the top of the keyhole. Here's a picture of the Chase Tower (formerly known as the Texas Commerce Tower). Arguably, space at the top of the keyhole was more prestigious than the floors above, including 54, where you couldn't even see the keyhole space. Maybe that was part of their problem. Their office space wasn't cool enough.
Another point of view regarding the Ion Storm office space was written up in 1998 here.
Coincidentally, the lawyer I worked for had a thing for style and appearance. He spent too much time worrying about that and not enough about his cases. As a result he ended up losing a HUGE case, filed for bankruptcy, lost his house and his wife and Mercedes, and had to move to a low-rent district in Dallas. Lawyers seem to always land on their feet, much like cats, however, so now, 3 years later, he's doing quite well again. I wish the Ion guys the same good fortune.
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.
Never mind the booring gameplay, sub-standard graphics, pointless AI, the fact that it was such a resource hog that it could bring a top-notch PC to it's knees, and it was 2+ years late coming to market, it was the title that was the most obnoxious error!
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.
Naturally, a better title would have made all the difference in the world.
Not!
The Daikatana team could have avoided this travesty and dumped the whole project in the rubbish heap! It would have been a small investment for quality!
I don't think that Daikatana has any positive lessons for the software or gaming industry. Just lots of bad ones...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
One of the best (IMHO) stories about the mess that was Ion Storm was by the Dallas Observer. It was covered in this old (1999!) /. article Ion Storm has Financial and Personnel difficulties. The story link is out of date as the Observer changed their website structure. The story is located here.
The "strategic creativity" in a game is less than 1% of the effort
Goes a long way toward explaining why so many games are loser copies of old shit, doesn't it? Coding is easy; coming up with a worthwhile, original idea -- that's harder.
I suppose some might find this interesting, and it does demonstrate some of what John is saying. First a bit of background: Day of Defeat is a Half-Life mod, I was part of the original team with Lil Squirel and Das Juden. Today, the mod has been released and is mildly popular. Lil Squirel and Das Juden came up with the concept somewhere around October 99. Lil knew I was a programmer, so asked me to join, I gave him some ideas, but refrained from joining until December because I was busy with school. I left the team in late April 2000.
DoD's initial design was killer. It had character classes, realistic damage, radar (yes, DoD had radar before CS), vehicles (jeeps, tanks), flame-thowers, grenades that you could dive on or throw back at your enemies, deployable tripod mounted machine-guns, and maps reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan, just to list a few; and this was just for version 1. We had all these incredibly cool concepts for effects and so forth but the team was so disorganised that nobody knew who was doing what; as John put it, there was no "someone in a position of authority forcing everything together". I was told to code the Thompson, I did and a short time later found out that it's code had already been written. I eventually got fed up with the whole thing and left the team. Apparently some time afterward the team underwent an overhaul and, to my surprize, eventually released Day of Defeat, I believe, over a year after its conception and with a different design altogether.
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
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Shouldn't that be "Fall and Sink?"
John,
First let me say that I agree with your position for the most part. However, when we were developing Millennium Four: The Right back in 95-96, we ran into a problem that we were an unknown house with some commercial game dev experience, a killer idea, and no game engine. The only way we were able to get a publishing contract was by developing that 500 page design document; it was faster to do that than it was to put an engine together that showed our vision. It cost us 4 months, but allowed us to work for the next 14 months on the game.
Unfortunately, our project got cancelled just as the game got interesting. Our publisher started going through hard times and cancelled a number of projects (I believe ours was one of about 15 that were cancelled), and we couldn't find alternative funding in time to keep going.
"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." Wise words, but only doable with the resources to back you up. In today's AAA-class game development business environment, only the well-funded can survive.
Rick
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
Knock the company for making a crap game yes, but when it comes to personal stuff and how companies operate I say to each his own
Agreed. Google likes to provide nice facilities for their employees, and it doesn't look like it has hurt their product.
"Cult of Personality". That has a ring. Just imagine the game scenarios you could build around that game...
This is actually sort of half-way serious. I can't really imagine the play, but it's certainly a popular theme in history and politics.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No, actually, the logical and hence mathematical way to go about such a thing would be to do just what Carmack said, "Do both".
;-) Maybe he will take the time and write a "Mythical Man Month" type of book, where he tells us how he does it.
It could be argued that what Carmack is preaching is a generalization of the elimination rule for the disjunctive logical connective ("or") in intuitionistic logic. You know "A or B" are options for constructing "C", and therefore you construct "C" assuming "A" as your choice AND you construct "C" assuming "B" as your choice. Either way, you are covered as far as constructing "C" is concerned.
I realize Carmack isn't going by formalized logic or anything, but he is a very logical guy... so you can extract such things from his decision making. After all, formalized intuitionistic logic is supposed to reflect the thinking of the "creative subject". Of course, in the USA, students are usually only exposed to classical logic, which isn't "constructive" in the mathematical sense... so I am probably just pissing in the wind here.
Also, who said that doing math excludes testing assumptions? When you are writing a computer program, it can be argued that you are writing a constructive proof (search for "constructive mathematics and computer science" on google). Several famous proofs have shown that constructive proof and program are the same thing (search for "curry howard isomorphism and computer science"). Surely you don't think that mathematicians sit in a meditation position, and then all of a sudden start writing a perfect proof proving what they were after. Just like writing programs, writing proofs requires many many many failed or partially successful attempts before a satisfactory proof is created.
I mean, I doubt Carmack sits in his office and "divines" perfect code the first time. Though, I could be wrong
Writing formal constructive proofs and writing computer programs are very much similar in how you go about doing the actual work. A computer scientist is another name for a mathematician. If you can't see the marriage between the two, then you have more learning to do.
Before ION Storm crashed and burned (20 million down the drain which caused Looking Glass to close, the bastages) I thought John (Romero) was kind of arrogrant. His "Design is Law" quote did it for me.
No, Design is NOT law -- Design *along with* Technology should dictate the game. Too much of either one, and you get a bad game.
It's interesting to see it told "from the inside." I guess John is a nice guy after all, but it's hard to know that, when the media loved to put him on a pedestal, and then tear him down again.
Unfortunately the damage has been done, and John has lost credability in the public. It will be interesting to see what he does next.
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.
I was lucky enough to go to the Eidos party at E3 in 1999.
These were heady days. Daikatana was about to be finally released. The PSX was at its peak. PC gaming was growing, growing, growing.
And I was standing next to Warren Specter in the queue.
He told me who he was, and I asked why he was standing with the plebs, rather than going through the VIP route he was no doubt entitled to.
Warren laughed and said he was with his team, and no way was he leaving them.
It is a rare thing to see someone with such a reputation prefer his team to his convenience, and whatever happened to ION Storm I wish him well.
--- My dad's political betting
> 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
Probably too busy entirely flashifying their site. Christ, tell them to offer a non-flash alternative.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I don't seem to have the problem when I use Opera
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