If you have been involved with videogames for any length of time, you have probably heard about a couple of nerds by the names of John Carmack and John Romero.
These guys (backed up by a rock-solid core of friends) were responsible for kickstarting the First Person Shooter genre through the kind of collaboration that seems mythical, almost as if belonging to the world of fiction (and not specially realistic fiction at that): one was a genius capable of advancing videogames decades through the use of creative coding and a refusal to accept the limits imposed on him by the technology available at the time, by what it could or couldn't do. The other was such a master of his craft that he could take these groundbreaking pieces of technology and turn them into mind-blowing videogames that people would go crazy over.
Legends, millionaires... and they don't even know it yet.
This partnership, amazing as it was, had magic in the fact that it wasn't started because both of our daring protagonists recognized each other's talents and decided to embark on an adventure to fund their own studio and get the world to see their vision, but because they were both low-paid employees just trying to make ends meet while coding little games and applications for a magazine by the name of SoftDisk. But once the long hours of coding the blandest of games turned into even longer conversations? Oh, it was clear that something was brewing, and it wasn't long before these two decided to roll the dice, betting on themselves and abandoning the modest (but stable) jobs they had in order to chase their dream.
The result of these efforts was Wolfenstein 3D, a game which needs no introduction and that effectively got our heroes to ride the high wave of success like nothing the industry had ever seen before. Through their work FPSs were suddenly dynamic, fun, fast-paced, action-packed and, above all, remarkably gory. Gone were the days where the screen had to be shrunk to a quarter of its size in order for the sprites to even move at any speed faster than a snail's. Gone were also the days of wandering around eye-burning mazes with barely anything in them. With Wolfenstein 3D players got a taste of what the genre could really be like. And that taste was only the beginning... because, you see, they weren't just going to rest on their laurels, and in 1993, we got our answer.
I don't think there's ever been a game as technologically mind-blowing as Doom.
What FPSs used to look like.
What Carmack had done was basically unheard-of: he had created an engine capable of rendering even faster-paced action than Wolf3D's while also showing ten times the detail. The engine he had programmed was also so beautifully optimized that people could run it on pretty much any system of its time (so long as they shrunk the screen a bit, because old habits die hard on technology). And with Romero's help, the game was a never-ending ode to the genre, even paying homage to the company's other successful titles by the time Doom 2 came about.
Doom had become such a sensation that even Bill Gates was bragging about how his ubiquitous Operating System could run it. Indeed, id Software's masterpiece would end up being installed on more PCs than Windows 95 by the time they had both finished their runs at the forefront of their respective industries. But if that all sounds too good to be true to you, I don't blame you... it's certainly a lot to take in. But it's also a 100% true and a perfect example of just how much different the gaming landscape was at the time that people could throw parades on the street over a game that would be a dime-a-dozen nowadays. But that's also the whole beauty of it: people hadn't seen anything quite like Doom before Doom, and then they wanted nothing but more of it, which created a completely overflooded market akin to the one that had caused the 1983 Game Crash through its countless imitators. And at the center of it all were the same two geeks who had bet on themselves and that were now embodying the American Dream by driving around on Ferraris. It's the kind of thing we trust our fiction to depict, not realizing that it could be reality. And these guys got to remind us of that in the flashiest way possible, down the barrel of a virtual, smoking shotgun.
What they made then look like.
However... just because their business was extremely successful (and despite them rolling on more dough that the entirety of New York City's pizza industry), that didn't mean that cracks weren't starting to form under the surface. And it's actually kind of fascinating in the same way that reading about an aircraft disaster is: by showing us that, sometimes, the most spectacular of disasters can spawn from the tiniest of dents, too small and deep to be noticed until it truly breaks.
What happened was that Romero was feeling tired of following on Carmack's footsteps, of waiting to turn his next technical marvel into the best-looking version of "Doom" yet. He wanted id Software to branch out, to try their hands at other genres, to "live a little" outside of their safety net. But Carmack wasn't keen on this idea and decided to focus more efforts into the creation of his newest, meanest machine yet: The Quake 1 engine.
Yet another gem, this beast was the newest, shiniest evolution of their same true-and-tried formula, and one that would allow them to advance the genre far beyond what Doom had proved possible through the use of its own mind-blowing technology. Quite fittingly, Quake was the thing that shook the ground at Id Software.
When everything went to hell... in the best possible way.
In a now infamous (and quite contradictory) story, Carmack had apparently programmed a tool that would log in just how much time Romero spent working on his computer, yielding less-than-ideal results (but, for the record, Romero said that this was done by the manager of a nearby developer who wanted to enforce crunch time on his employees, whom then mutinied and went off to start their own studio -- Rouge Entertainment, creators of Strife). Whatever the case, mistrust of that size couldn't solve itself, and so Romero left Id Software with a ton of money on his bank account and a ton of prestige on his back, looking to realize the dreams that, he felt, Carmack and crew were pushing him back on.
In 1996, John Romero funded Ion Storm, the studio of his dreams.
On many ways, Ion Storm was the anti-Id Software: a large studio full of people recruited from all walks of life (from seasoned developers to fans who had been publishing Doom and Quake maps for years) which would also focus on multiple projects at a time. Romero's logic (and not an ENTIRELY flawed one at that) was that a bunch of people could tackle a bunch of tasks at the same time, resulting on a workflow that mostly made sense. But, of course, things can never be simple -- problems started almost immediately once it was clear that these rookies weren't adapting all that well to the corporate life and that they weren't given enough overseeing. Many artists also had to be retrained because, even though they were quite talented veterans poached directly from Marvel and other comic book publishers, very few of them had any actual 3D modeling experience. These were all minor-ish setbacks that proved to be a rude awakening for the company and its management as they started to give shape to what promised to be their biggest asset: Daikatana.
Imagine having a millionaire bragging about YOUR product to promote his.
Before we dive into Daikatana proper, it should be noted that Romero was even able to reach the point of pitching that idea because he was one of the biggest names in the industry at the time and his prestige was legendary.
When Eidos Interactive caught wind of his project, they immediately rushed to sign a deal with the man himself, promising "unlimited" funding and support for Ion Storm in exchange for the right to publish their games exclusively. And all that sounds super reasonable, except for the fact that Ion Storm had no games to their name (or even the general outlines of any of them bar the aforementioned Daikatana) at the time of signing, which led them to scramble to buy the rights to the Dominion series from 7th Level just to have something to show to their new corporate overlords, all whilst still working on plans to open subsidiaries and even a comic book division.
All of this sounds very stupid (and, to an extend, it is), but Romero certainly wasn't. He knew what he wanted Daikatana to be and how to accomplish it, so he decided to discard the idea of programming his own game engine (something that some people in the company were actively campaigning for) and instead rebuilt the bridge with Id Software, licensing the Quake I engine to run his masterpiece. This was a very sound move that is often under-discussed --if not downright ignored-- when talking about Ion Storm, but it was one of those moments in which everything threatened to come together beautifully.
Actually really nice offices to slave away in.
Indeed, the demo of Daikatana presented in the E3 of 1997 showed off a pretty nice-looking, competent game with nice effects and even nicer gameplay to go along with it. Romero's outrageous claims that the game was going to be ready for the Christmas season of 1998 looked like it may just happen...
... But those hopes were dashed the second that the heaviest hitter of that year's expo made its entrance: Quake II, a monster of a game boasting an even bigger and better engine than its predecessor, one that could seemingly do the impossible and whose selling point was its ability to render multiple light sources in real time and with different colors. It was eye candy of the highest order and it made everything else look outdated and dull by comparison, including Daikatana.
It is here, at this point, that the problems truly started for Romero, Ion Storm, and the public in general.
Even though many employees advised him not to try to chase Carmack's shadow, our hero decided that Daikatana should be released at the forefront of the industry, both technologically and otherwise. And because of the contract between Id Software and Ion Storm, the latter would get a copy of the Quake II engine for free as soon as it was released at the end of 1997. Romero accepted this missed deadline with the kind of stoicism that only a man with a plan could, and he wasn't wrong... after all, all it would really take to get the show back on the road was a few weeks to adapt all the work already made for Daikatana to the new engine. Certainly a setback, but nothing too big.
I'd say that the (much hated) move to the Quake II engine was still the right choice.
But what caught the upper echelons of Ion Storm completely by surprise was the fact that the Quake II engine was an entirely different beast than its predecessor -- this was no "refinement", but something completely new and incompatible with the full year of work they were trying to port into it. This fell like a bucket of cold water on the team that had poured their hearts and souls into the making of Daikatana, working on endless shifts of around twelve hours each, just to be told that the goal was basically just as far as it had originally been. Some employees quit and many more were fired after realizing that the luxury offices they had been working on (with their marble floors, pool tables and arcade cabinets) were nothing more than a golden cage for them and for their careers. This was the first blow of a larger hurricane destined to collide with the studio.
Things wouldn't have been so bad if a horrendous ad campaign for the game hadn't already been approved and published -- an ad that showed no actual screenshots from Daikatana, but that absolutely insulted anyone who read it (by design, too). This added to the already mounting pressure coming from all angles, with management at Eidos Interactive leading the charge after getting tired of funding games that weren't materializing (or were just half-assed, soulless reskins of other company's IPs).
In November of 1998, a friend took our hero for dinner in town and warned him that bad news were awaiting him at the office.
Indeed, the very next morning Romero found that the entire team responsible for coding and programming his flagship game had quit overnight, forcing him to organize a new one as soon as possible, all whilst rumors of an acquisition by Eidos multiplied.
In January of 1999, Daikatana's transition to the new engine was nearly completed and a demo was given the finishing touches to be presented at that year's E3. It was probably the last chance Ion Storm had to turn the tides on this whole thing, but a last-minute compilation error caused the demo they had prepared to crawl on screen at almost single-digit framerates. This was the stroke the broke the camel's back and, just a few months later, Eidos completed the (hostile) acquisition of Ion Storm, removing everyone but Romero from their leadership positions and trusting him with finishing the damn game.
I mean... At least they tried doing something interesting with it, even if they went a little lights crazy.
And he more or less did that after surveying the "battlefield" and coming in contact with an artist working on an arrow to be fired from one of the million weapons already coded into the game. Problem was that this artist was creating a really beautiful piece of work, heavily detailed with the kinds of things that people stop for... but that was supposed to be a few pixels long in-game. No-one had bothered training this particular artist for the role he was supposed to fill and it is safe to say that this wasn't just a fluke. The 400-page-long (!) design documents for Daikatana went over a lot of stuff, but the people responsible for getting those ideas across to the employees tasked with making them happen certainly didn't translate them well.
This was all very telling of the kind of hell that was wrecking the company from the inside, but the biggest problem was within the game itself.
You see... following Ion Storm's own design philosophies, a whole lot of people had worked on Daikatana (including five lead engineers) which resulted on the game suffering from tons of small programming errors, bugs, glitches and other anomalies. These proved to be particularly hard to fix and, if the final results were anything to go by, they never quite managed to do so.
Too bad that the company cared way too much about surface-level stuff like having the coolest building around.
The famed (and now much maligned) companion AI was particularly broken and these two allies were among the biggest headaches to work around or fix due to how deeply integrated into the code their every movement and routine was. Save games were another such matter, exacerbated by the novel (but hated) "gems" that functioned as the game's own system for recording and restoring data.
Despite all of that, Ion Storm threw a large party at the end of 1999 to celebrate that the game was going to be released... except that it wasn't so. Not like that.
At that point it almost didn't matter, though. The press and much of the gaming world had already made up their minds about Romero and his game, and is for that very reason that the almost heroic efforts of the young programmer tasked with fixing all of this when no-else would go largely (and unjustly) ignored. I have actually found conflicting information about the identity of this wizard of the code, but I know that he was the one responsible for updating and maintaining Ion Storm's website (which is, in itself, very telling of what hopeless of a situation this was), but he managed to get it all working just enough to move on to a proper release of the game.
What's almost cruel in a cosmic scale is the fact that Daikatana couldn't even get a clean release, being overshadowed by another game released at roughly the same time by its same company: Deus Ex, immediate winner of several Game Of The Year awards and almost universally considered the greatest PC game of all-time. It was enough to make you question whether Romero and crew had insulted Cthulhu or something.
There's a special kind of cruelty to being killed by a game with awful combat mechanics.
Whatever the case, the game was received very poorly by the press and the public alike, but not without malice. It is true that Daikatana wasn't anything special by the time it finally hit store shelves, that offerings like Half-Life and Quake III had buried it before it could even find its footing, and that it was tough to love because of the many issues still presented within, but that didn't mean that all criticisms were fair (in fact, a fair chunk of them were BS and only there to kick it when it was already down). People made fun of the writing (which IS pretty poor) and also considered the game to be "an endless parade of racist stereotypes", which I know nothing about but didn't seem the case for me after spending many hours listening to and following these people. I have also heard criticisms to the voice acting, but I found it to be really great across the board, and perhaps the one saving grace of this whole mess.
I don't intend to review Daikatana (or any other game released by Ion Storm) in detail here, for I don't think any of us have three more hours to waste starting at my ramblings. The point of this article was to illustrate the kind of perfect storm that was, well, Ion Storm, what it was and what it meant. Some details were left out because I couldn't find proper conformation for them (despite them being "common knowledge"), while others almost strayed into personal attack territory for people I don't know and haven't wronged me in any way, shape, or form.
A much more skilled writer than myself once described Romero and Ion Storm as "proof that success is often far more dangerous than failure, for it feeds senselessness until it grows monstrous". I completely agree with that statement and I think that it is seen all throughout the four years the team tried to give shape to a game that was supposed to put them on the map and ended up wiping them out completely.
I don't think this is a cautionary tale, but it is one without which the full story of gaming cannot be told, and maybe that's a far bigger reward than a perfect (if outdated and quickly forgotten) release would have gotten.
Til next time!
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