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zach | 2 years ago
To make this more HN-relevant, I will say that the whole point of Ion Storm was supposed to be unleashing Romero’s game direction, but the business partners who were supposed to give him that space instead provided another level of distraction.
John worked insanely hard and doesn’t blame others for what he’s responsible for, but with all the business chaos at Ion which he dealt with personally, he just could not be on top of everything and that’s the major reason why DK was not the epic game it could have been. That’s the part that he doesn’t want to say, but to me it’s clear.
It’s a good example of why a startup needs its product visionary highly focused at the most critical times. As a rough approximation, every night John went to bed thinking about Ion’s latest issues instead of thinking about Daikatana was a lost chance to make the game 2% better. That adds up.
MegaDeKay|2 years ago
I read the article and it certainly touches on the high points, but to John's credit, he goes into much deeper detail in the book. Eight people left because of high level infighting, but John knew of the problem and didn't do anything about it until it was too late. John was for buying the Anachronox crew thinking it was an easy way to knock off one of their game commitments to Eidos. Turned out it wasn't so easy. Eidos was all in on the fancy office tower and happy to pay because it would be their corporate HQ as well.
I was a bit surprised that the article said Dallas was a difficult place to staff. My impression from the book was that good people were so keen to work with a big name game developer that they'd go anywhere to do so. My memory from the book was that John got pretty much anyone he made an offer to.
zach|2 years ago
From what I learned about it since that time, the details John shares in the book are definitely much more significant factors in why things happened why they did. And if anyone needed to learn what the words “vertical slice” meant, it was the DK production team. Programming the sidekicks, a definitional feature, was left until close to the end of the project, with disappointing results.
So the complaints about how hard staffing was and how people didn’t want to come to Dallas were straight from John’s mouth, but I think it had a lot to do with the state of the project and Ion. Steve Ash (RIP), our fourth lead programmer, was just about ready to return to California where he would end up helping to start Double Fine, so that situation was on his mind (speaking to me as a California fly-in AI programmer).
But as the 1300x960 arrow story typified, experienced developers were hard to find as team sizes were doubling from 20 to 40 throughout the industry. At the same time, Daikatana was being roasted constantly on Old Man Murray, Something Awful and various messageboards, and Half-Life made Daikatana’s story and cinematic ambitions seem less impressive. So by 1999, it’s fair to say Ion Storm was a hard sell as a place to work for a lot more reasons than the Dallas area...
* - https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/stormy-weather-6427649
lloeki|2 years ago
Sure it was buggy as hell (at lest the build I had and how it behaved on my specific machine) and had a ton of flaws, and I could not complete the game due to a particular bug, but I could not help but feel something happening deep down inside this game. Frustratingly I can't exactly put my finger on it, but if I tried it'd be like I was reading between the lines^Wissues and in a way experienced that instead of the thing you directly interacted with.
And that wasn't because of the hype as it was handed over to me among a pile of other discs before I even heard of it (which is what happens when you live in some random remote area).