Slashdot Mirror
Ion Storm Austin Closes
It's dragged on for quite a while, but GamesIndustry.biz has the word that the Ion Storm offices in Austin have closed. Originally founded by John Romero, Tom Hall, and Todd Porter, Ion Storm Austin has been responsible for the release of Deus Ex, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and Daikatana. From the article: "This is part of [Eidos's] move to consolidate and strengthen its technical and management capabilities into a smaller number of studios which are capable of scaling up in order to meet the competitive challenges that lie ahead, particularly in anticipation of next-generation technologies and platforms"
Well the official reason is that they have decided they would rather increase the size of their San Francisco studio by adding another development team there instead of continuing carrying the cost of an extra studio. This makes fincancial sense since from what little I know, the main benefit of a game company having studios in different locations is for the purpose of recruiting developers from different regions (e.g. Ubisoft opened a Montreal studio to recruit North American developers) and right now people are far more willing to move for a new job.
However, they are firing 35 people in Austin and hiring 50 in San Francisco. I didn't see anything about them moving anyone from Austin to San Francisco so they must not be satisfied with the team in Austin.
Also, the team in Austin wasn't responsible for Daikatana. That was spawned from John Romero's hedonistic Dallas studio. That closed down long ago. Pretty much everything good that Ion Storm produced came from the Austin studio.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
I never went far in Daikatana but liked Deus Ex a lot. I love the Thief series but was quite disappointed when Thief: Deadly Shadows PC version turned out to be just a port of the console version. Levels in Thief and Thief 2 were huge (ie: the Life of the Party level in T2) but in T:DS one had to go from zone to zone. The city was more like a small town rather than the intimidating place it was in the two first games.
Trolling is a art,
Aparently you haven't played Anachronox. Whilst many would not consider it up to the standards of Deus Ex, it's still a damned fine game. One of the best PC RPGs to date.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Daikatana was made by Ion Storm Dallas, Jon Romero's studio.
Ion Storm Austin was founded using some of Romero's money, but the core of the team was all the old Looking Glass guys that worked on the original Thief and System Shock titles. Looking Glass had gone bankrupt a few months earlier, for reasons I still don't totally understand.
There are lots of funny stories about ISA's start-up, Warren Specter had to explain to people all the time that "no no no, that's Ion Storm DALLAS, we're Ion Storm AUSTIN, we have nothing to do with Daikatana," etc etc.
Ion Storm Austin was started as an independent studio and became a part of Ion Storm when Romero talked Spector into it during their search for initial funding.
This happened before Looking Glass closed. When Looking Glass closed, Ion Storm Austin acquired the rights to Thief and hired some of the Looking Glass guys.
My memory is a bit fuzzy on the timing exactly, but i think Deus Ex had been released by the time Looking Glass closed.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
Eidos has been unfortunate enough to produce some real shitty titles - Whiplash comes to mind - but they are not just a Tomb Raider company.
The Legacy of Kain line have been up and down, but there's some real gems in there.
Anachronox was a beaut, even redone as a machinima movie it was wonderful.
Deus Ex was good. Deus Ex: Invisible War suffered too much from trying to pare it down to console size.
The first Tomb Raider was actually decently fun, it's just that they never should have made a sequel.
The Thief series is golden, beautiful all the way through. Deadly Shadows was wonderful to play; I hope we see another, perhaps picked up by the expanded Crystal Dynamics (you know, the guys who do Kain).
Eidos has been squeezed like all midrange developers because the cost of development keeps going up - nothing more, nothing less.
So who owns the rights to the Deus Ex franchise? Even though DX:IW was somewhat of a disaster, the idea behind the game's still great. Open ended game play, great storylines etc.
I wonder if Deus Ex 3 could be picked up by some other development company. It'd be nice to see a third installment.
> The Tomb Raider franchise has had more misses than the Prince of Persia franchise, but I can't tell how many PoP games there have been.
... many years pass ...
... several years pass ...
Five.
Prince of Persia 1: Old 2D DOS game. Wickedly frustrating timed-the-buttons-just-so puzzles. And the whole game was on a time limit. Time runs out, game over. Still quite fun for its day.
Prince of Persia 2: Basically a rehash of PoP1, but slightly more colorful.
Prince of Persia 3d: A buggy klunky disaster. Good 3d games were pretty rare at the time, most cards wouldn't have had the juice to do what was needed to pull this off. Camera controls were really bad.
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Stunningly good and game, smooth, pretty, good character and camera controls. The prince is a downright acrobat now, with the added gravity-defying kung-fu like ability of running along walls even from a dead stop. Well-written characters with good (though not outstanding) voice acting. Console and PC ports have control schemes that work very well on each platform.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Much darker and more combat-oriented than Sands of Time. Still has a number of "puzzles" (the platformer genre never has real puzzles like those in adventure games), but the focus is mainly on combat. Reasonably interesting premise, but the voice acting has sadly taken a dive, with the prince never being all that likeable, and the enemy (your standard vampish-chick-in-platemail-lingerie) not all that believable.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
First looking glass studios fold and sell the fantastic thief franchise to Ion Storm, now they've kicked the bucket. What's going to happen to the great Thief series? Gutted...