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.

Comments

To summarize

[Lothar 0]

Here's a nice way to demonstrate the fall of Ion Storm.

Let me summarize the story for you...

[jjohnson]

"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?"

Re:Let me summarize the story for you...

[Rogerborg]

• Won't someone give me a job doing the same thing?

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.

Crappy Bot AI killed Ion Storm...

[Bonker]

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.

They should have called it "meiken."

[Rank Amateur]

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).

Re:They should have called it "meiken."

[MrResistor]

Whether it's a real japanese word or not, it's been floating around in gaming circles for a long time, from D&D to Daggerfall to the game in question, and undoubtably many stops in between. In every case it has meant, simply, "big sword", sort of a Claymore Katana, rather than some specific sword of legend as you seem to suggest it should.

The meanings of characters when slapped together, is largely dependent on context, though, so I'd say you've got a bit of hubris yourself declaring the word invalid, at least by the somewhat fractured arguements you present. I won't argue pronunciation since I don't speak Japanese, but my wife's boss is Japanese and she's frequently approached by people who want Kanji Tattoos. She says it's tricky business weighing all the possible alternate meanings against the intended one and picking the combination that is best overall.

To summarise

[Violet Null]

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.

A Word of Support for John

[coupland]

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.

Re:A Word of Support for John

[tswinzig]

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.

Uhhh yeah dude, maybe because they are scared of his power? Why burn a bridge with BG if you want to do well in the industry?

As for Romero, I agree. When they were working on Quake, and all the hype going with it, I decided one night to try a 'talk jromero@idsoftware.com' (or whatever his address was at the time). A few seconds later I was chatting with him at work. I think the conversation went something like this:

JR: Hello
Me: Whoa! Are you the real John Romero?
JR: Yes
Me: What are you doing at the office this late?
JR: Dude, I just got in to work.
Me: Cool.

Ahh yes, those were the days.

Re:Romero left after Quake2?

[Judas96']

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.

Hmmm...

[Raymond Luxury Yacht]

From the looks of Stevie "KillCreek" Case, she's been working in *cough* silicon valley quite a bit since hooking up with Romero...

I want my 10 minutes back

[ellem]

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.

Some good lessons learned

[Ooblek]

I believe Gamespot had an article come out right after Daikatana was released that chronicled what was going on at id and Ion Storm up to the release. I believe the lessons learned at Ion Storm are actually quite valuable, especially when someone is thinking about starting up *ANY* type of software company.

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.

Snoooze

[The Panther!]

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.

Comments

[John Carmack]

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

Re:Comments

[NelnoTheAmoeba]

>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

The real reason Ion Storm failed...

[SilLumTao]

as reported by Something Awful:

John Romero Releases Details on Next Project: "John Romero Presents John Romero's 'John Romero'"

Re:Definitions of terms

[John Carmack]

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

Re:Definitions of terms

[John Carmack]

> 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