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)
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
John Romero Releases Details on Next Project: "John Romero Presents John Romero's 'John Romero'"
"He was a wise man who invented beer." -- Plato
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
Shouldn't that be "Fall and Sink?"
And here's more about the Third Law drama (Third Law Interactive was the company they went off to start).
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.
> 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
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