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Games Entertainment

Ion Storm has Financial and Personnel difficulties 45

Posted by sengan from the will-GoD-do-Linux-ports,-like-their-Mac-ports? dept.
Shane McLochlainn writes "The Dallas Observer Online is reporting that Ion Storm, who employs ex-ID Doom/Quake hacker John Romero is in severe financial & personnel difficulties. Apparently most of the team programming the debut flagship game, Daikatana, have jumped ship to rival Games company Gathering of Developers (GoD), founded by ex-Ion Stormers. "
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Ion Storm has Financial and Personnel difficulties More

Ion Storm has Financial and Personnel difficulties

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  • The entire article starts here: http://www.dallasobserver .com/1999/011499/feature1-1.html [dallasobserver.com]
  • Didn't some of these guys start out at apogee, then to id, and then to ion storm?

  • I hardly think Ion Storm is going to die anytime in the near future. Sure, Daikatana has had some problems in the development, but it's not the only Ion Storm game, just the one Romero's working on. Fellow Ion Storm co-founders (and also former id software people) are also heading development of Deus Ex and Anachronox, both of which received favorable reviews and lots of hype in last month's PC Games. they both look like they'll be good (and sell well).
  • Posted by modefan:


    I hope that Daikitana will be given away (source code that is), much like Golgo was. It's too bad that these people don't know how to sharpen their skills to release stuff.
  • Posted by Q!:

    I knew this would happen. Romero is such a dork. So he wrote a little code in Wolf and Doom, BIG DEAL, this was supposed make him a "VISIONARY." I can see how working with Abrash, Carmack and company would make someone's head swell, but if EDIOS couldn't see this little snot bag for what he is, and who the real talent is over at id, they
    deserve to lose all that money. You'd have to be brain dead to invest in that guy.

  • Engineers hate management for many good reasons. One is you need someone to focus the engineers on the end result and getting it on time. Someone to force a compromise (to the worse) to get something out on time.

    Management also needs to focus, and stay focused. Thats why Steve Job's had to kill Apple's Newton program. It was a good product, but there was too much on apple's plate. ITs better to be a small profitable company then a large unprofitable one. (Of course it is even better to be a large profitable company)

    Now that I think about it, those two hour meetings every couple months to introduce a future Dilber comic are good if only because they keep upper managemnt busy with minor things while the work gets done, instead of commiting to the latest fad all the time. Something to think about.

    I also noticed they fell into man-month traps in the above.

  • "How can you spend that much on a stupid 3d shoot-em-up game?"

    Well, I know $2 million was spent furnishing their expensive and luxurious high-rise office space.

  • whee (Score:1)

    by Rational ( 1990 )
    Well, fuck, I guess that the fail-safe formula for finding boring game genres is "whatever the hell I don't personally like".

    I love both first-person shooters and fighting games (the finest of which, VF3, has a depth of gameplay comparable to any game on any genre), and guess what, RPGs bore the living hell out of me. This does not necessarily mark me as stupider, shorter, uglier or younger than you.

    The success of hunting games originated a lot more from an influx of people who just bought their first Packard Bell to go on AOL and want a game to go with it than from any hypothetical backlash against the FPS genre.
  • Heh... Frankly, I find a lot easier to believe that ION Stom is so FUBAR is not even funny, than there is some kind of libelous conspiracy of ex-employees to badmouth their former employer. Use Occam's Razor, kid.

    "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity"

    It was an amusing read, though.

  • I always heard it referred as Heinlein's razor, but you are right.

    What I meant is that stupidity is a simpler explanation than conspiracy, at any rate... :)
  • Its all Romero...his ego got too big for iD so he moved to someplace where he could let it reign...as history shows, big egos usually come crashing down.
  • The Daikatana Vaporware Fiasco has gone on long enough and deserves to die. Romero has had lot's of fun playing up to the press, playing the rock-and-roll badboy of software, but the prodigal son's joyride has to come to a close sometime. There's nothing of substance to hold it up underneath. His Official Id Game Development Hero card has been played to the max. I hope they (Id) take him back someday (as an employee, not a partner) to do level and concept design.

  • Yuck (Score:1)

    by Radnor ( 4434 )

    I have absolutely NO interest in Daikatana anymore. None whatsoever.

    Their petty bickering in the offices will delay this thing until something better comes out, which will force them to revise their code to compete, delaying it even more.

    The trend these days also seems to be that the more hyped a thing is, the uglier it will turn out to be.

    But who knows how this will turn out? I lost interest awhile ago. :P

  • AMEN! (Score:1)

    by shawn ( 5323 )
    IMHO as gamer Romero leaving ID was best thing. He was always into the medievil stuff & started gearing doom/quake that direction ie heritic/quake1 ...wasn't untill he left that id got back on track with gameplay & kickass weapons. I mean that lightening rod in Q1 wtf was that!
    Carmack is THE MAN & no I hope ID doesn't let him back.

  • whee (Score:1)

    by hime ( 5963 )
    I read the Dallas Observer every week, living near Dallas. I read that article this week and laughed and laughed and laughed.

    3d first person shooters are boring, how many of them do you need? Half-Life is pretty, but it's the cream of a dull crop.

    John Romero may be a very good programmer, but he's not very creative.
  • i've been keeping up with this "soap opera" that's going on in Dallas. and here is what i think:

    1)John Romero has alot of talent in game design, i don't think many will dispute this. he is undoubtably a man with a vision. the problem is he wants to create a landmark game in the FPS genre. well...i think that is an exercise in futility. Diakatana is intended to be of comparable stature to the Legend of Zelda, or perhaps even Zork. and, suprisingly, it might even be able to do that; if it were to be produced in another genre. FPS is too saturated for a game of this stature to really get noticed.

    2) Romero, dispite all his press, still doesn't have enough clout to delay a game this long. i think only Shiguru Myamato (with apologies for spelling) and a very few others could do this without fear of losing funding.

    3)the FPS genre itself works against Romero. consumers want fast everything: frame rates, action, and production timelines. That is why, perhaps, so many of the future FPS titles are going multiplayer-only. because single-player is too slow and boring for the all-night caffine-crazed frag-fests (i should know). but, in order to produce a game of such epic proportions as Zelda or Zork, you MUST have single-player. which is something us FPS freaks are increasingly un-interested in.

    4)admittedly i am a loyal id software fan, but at the same time i do respect Romero for his ambition and i really wish he could finish his vision of a game, just because i'm curious if he really is that good.

    okay i'm done rambling.
    on a side note: i was really sad to see American McGee go...oh well, i suppose that's how this business works.

  • I'm fed up with this whole thing, between Ion Storm, Firaxis, G.O.D. and all the other start ups of supposed gaming geniuses that got sick of the corporations they worked for. These guys must get written up and interviewed so many times that they seem to believe they are the most important people on earth and that we care where they are developing their games. Come on, they're just games, it's your JOB, if you're not happy than oh well, it's a JOB. Had Romero and his ilk stayed at their original development houses, they could've created several games by now, and I don't think that any of those games would be significantly worse than the games that they've spent the last three years developing.
  • ...I'm not *at all* surprised. John predicted this when Romero announced his plans, and we all agreed. Look at Quake: it took a long time to come out, and really wasn't a spectacular improvement.

    Why? Romero spent so much time "play testing" and not enough time actually coding. He thinks his a coding god on the same level as John or Michael, but he just isn't. And he's too egotistical to admit, or at least _see_, when he's taken on too much. Romero leaving id was a great boon for Q2. And QA is coming along quite nicely without Mr. Romero's "expertise".

    And, so, Ion's product is going down in flames. Wow, John was *right*? I'm amazed...really...
  • Actually, most game designers spend the majority of their time on something else. Maps, code, art, QA, whatever. There are a few cases (massively multiplayer RPGs come to mind) where there's enough detail for a designer to spend all of his or her time doing designer stuff. But FPS don't exactly fall into that category ;)

    -Cybrid

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