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John Romero Back In The Game
Gamespot reports that John Romero, the well known former id software designer, has opened his own development studio for the first time in several years. From the article: "Romero and Midway parted ways after just two years. He had been hired, along with former Ion Storm colleague Tom Hall, in October, 2003. His departure in July of this year was amicable on the surface, but chatter among industry wags suggested the Midway brass weren't entirely impressed with the work Romero and his team produced. At the time of his departure, Romero and Hall were working on the still-unreleased action role-playing game Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows."
Despite hpye, Daikatana isn't the worst game ever. It's a sub-standard FPS which was missing a lot of polish, didn't allow you to save until a later patch (instead preferring to use save points), and generally felt like a chore to play.
One of the problems was that this wasn't just some developer - this was one of the visions behind Id, who split off to form his own studio so that his creative vision could flourish.
The second problem was that the game kept getting delayed so that they could hypothetically get it right.
Finally, the game was the victim of a vicious hype campaign - some of it fan generated it, but much of it generated by Ion Storm themselves. There was the "John Romero will make you his bitch" advertisement which, honestly, if the game had been as great as everyone expected, would've been viewed as an eccentric ad by one of the gaming industry's greatest (for, before Daikatana shipped, Romero was one of the industry's greats). Since Daikatana flopped, the advertisement rubbed people the wrong way, as if it were a boast. Imagine if Muhammed Ali's career flopped after he claimed to be the greatest, or if Rickey Henderson went on a streak of 20 times caught stealing after he'd broken the stolen base record and claimed that he was the best.
Ion Storm was made up of 3 seperate designers, each with their own projects. Romero made Daikatana, Tom Hall made the quirky RPG Anachronox (poorly designed, but well implemented, IMHO), and Warren Spector made the beloved Deus Ex. Not surprisingly, Spector's team was the only one that survived their first release.
Now, Warren Spector has his own company, while the other two have yet to make a successful game (as mentioned in the summary).
So, yes, Romero was a founder of Ion Storm, but no, he had nothing to do with Deus Ex.
Romero and Hall came out with Storm Over Gift 3, an unbelievably primitive and generally crappy RTS, and followed it with Daikatana, an unbelievably primitive and generally crappy FPS.
Spector's Ion Storm studio came out with Deus Ex.
Ion Storm was a company where the company logo meant either shit or sugar, but you had to look for which studio had produced the game.