LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Daikatana
built 210 days ago
Daikatana wouldn't be the only failure for Ion Storm. In order to get funded they signed a six-title deal with Eidos, and their plan was to basically take some half-completed projects, wrap them up quick and get them out the door. Their first game was the RTS game Dominion by Todd Porter, which should've taken $50,000 and about three months to complete. It instead cost more then hundreds of thousands, took over a year, and wind up selling only 10,000 copies, way below the expected the level of half of million. It ... didn't help that they released the game on the same day Blizzard released a demo version of Starcraft. The game was also responsible for causing the decaying morale, because the Daikayana team felt like they were getting shafted when Dominion was getting resources over them.
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Due to these and other problems, Daikatana was delayed multiple times from its conception in early 1997 to its eventual release in 2000. By this time, numerous games based on more advanced graphical technology (such as Id Software's Quake III and Epic MegaGames' Unreal Tournament) had already been released, causing Daikatana to lag technologically in the market with its dated Quake II game engine. Additionally, its gameplay had many aspects that were widely disliked by players, such as an artificially limited number of saves per level and the presence of computer-controlled "sidekicks" who were an active impediment to the player. As a result, Daikatana garnered a mediocre-at-best reception from reviewers and users alike. Many believe the fallout from Daikatana sidelined Romero's career in the high-end PC gaming industry for a number of years, though Romero himself has stated that he chose to make his next company, Monkeystone, drastically smaller for his own reasons. The game was a major contributing factor in the closure of Ion Storm's Dallas office.
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Since Daikatana's inception, elite and obsessive gamers have road-tripped from around the world to work with their hero, Romero. They've quit school, left relationships and literally built beds under their desks to live and breathe nearly every breath in the house Romero built. Their commitment to a self-described "death schedule" -- the final, endless rush to perfect their game -- isn't just some start-up novelty, it's a way of life.
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The Daikatana team was then frantically trying to create a new, far more impressive demo for E3 that year. Last minute changes to the level design led to a demo that could only run at about 12 frames per second, far less than the 30 frames per second that was considered a minimum for first person shooters. The E3 disaster led to a crisis for Ion Storm. Eidos, the parent company who had financed Ion Storm to the tune of $25 million so far, had enough. In June 1999, Eidos and Ion Storm reached an agreement. Eidos got majority ownership of Ion Storm, and founders Todd Porter and Jerry O'Flaherty left the company.
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As if it weren't bad enough that the game had an insulting marketing quote, Daikatana was promised to be done in seven months after the founding of Ion Storm, basically coming out right before Christmas '97. A game that would have 24 levels split into 4 distinct time periods, 25 weapons, and 64 monsters all done in seven months? A lot of people thought that would be impossible to do, and it turns out they were right, because Daikatana completely missed the initial release date. One of the reasons was not only doing a game of this size impossible to finish so quickly, but because the game was using the Quake engine and Epic recently released the Quake II engine. Romero thought making the switch between engines would be easy, but because the Quake II engine was so much different then the original Quake engine, Ion Storm would have to throw away all their work on the game so far and start over again from scratch. But then again, Capcom did that once with Resident Evil 2 and several times with Resident Evil 4, but in the end RE2 was a great game and RE4 was one of the best video games of the year it was released and is still a big seller three years after release.
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Daikatana was touched at the hand of countless designers during its protracted development, but it is impossible to separate the final outcome from its lead architect, John Romero. His blueprint included a strong plot as well as awesome new sights, monsters and weapons around each turn and bend. This is not a one-note game, but a content-rich product that manages to transform its core elements four times without losing focus. The plot ... has considerable impact, incorporating an unexpected twist at the end as well as a final "shot" that has genuine emotional pull. In these areas, Romero succeeded. He also wanted to soup up the standard 3D shooter model with computer-controlled companions--no longer a radical idea since the emergence of the squad-based tactical action genre--and while there are some definite rough edges, the two supporting actors manage to spice up the proceedings when functioning.
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