Daikatana @ E3

People, people, people. I'll admit that the demo by all means isn't the greatest example of freeware on the net today. But why all the judgement for a game which none of us have played? From what I know, DK is going to be a huge success in the storyline dept. and a nice switch away from all the tactical shooters out there (counter-strike, rogue spear, swat 3, delta force2, SoF, etc.) -- the demo can't really provide us with a storyline (so the demo is disorientating). Personally, I look forward to playing through an epic storyline 4 times larger than HL. Sure the engine is dated and early hype was a bad decision on the part of Ion, but are you, hardcore gamers, not going to give it a chance? At least wait for a Gamespy, PC Gamer or Avault review before jumping into the "steaming DK crap" bandwagon. My judgement is reserved for the full version and the full version only.

I paid $2.50 for this article, so I'm cross-posting it in a few threads. It's an interesting read, taken from an article in the NY Times last year.

Okay guys, I paid $2.50 for this article, so you better goddamn read it!

A Game Boy in the Cross Hairs

By Paul Keegan

Hiro's on a rampage. He's a vaguely Asian crusader with giant muscles bursting through an armored torso, but since you're watching the world through his eyes, all you see is his Ion Blaster gun and dungeon floors and walls hurtling by so fast your stomach somersaults into your throat. Whoa, look out! It's Superfly Johnson -- Hiro's gargantuan bald and black nemesis -- streaking by, blasting away with his Sidewinder gun. Hiro leaps to avoid the rocket-powered missiles, then pivots and fires. Green laser beams ricochet off the fortress walls, exploding like fireworks. Superfly's fragged! Body parts drop from the sky like bloody rain, gibs splattering the walls -- and if you don't know that's short for giblets, slang for chunks of flesh, then you're a llama, a newbie loser, and shouldn't be hanging around Kyoto 2455 A.D. in the first place.

''Ha! Take that, dude!''

John Romero sits at his computer, chortling. A colleague curses from another room. It's early March, before anyone has ever heard of Littleton, Colo., and the co-creator of the computer games Doom and Quake is showing off his new gorefest, Daikatana. As Hiro, he has just fragged a co-worker playing Superfly Johnson in a ''death match,'' a battle via linked computers. ''That's cool, huh?'' Romero says. ''You can see how much more visceral this game is.'' Romero is 31, with long, silky black hair. He wears tight designer jeans and a black T-shirt, and has the slightly pudgy frame of someone who has spent a lifetime staring at computer screens while drinking Cokes and eating candy bars. Death match over, he gets up and walks through the spectacular, glass-encased penthouse office of his company, Ion Storm, glancing briefly at the panoramic view of downtown Dallas. Down in the garage, he climbs into his yellow 1991 Ferrari Testarossa, which looks like a rocket-powered capsule from a child's fantasy. ''It's got a turbocharged engine,'' he yells over the roar, vaulting into traffic.

Does John Romero rule or what? Already a legend in the bizarro world of computer game fanatics, he has lately seemed on the cusp of the mainstream stardom he clearly craves, having been celebrated as ''the Quentin Tarantino of computer-game megaviolence'' by GQ and given rock-star treatment by the technology press. It was Romero, along with a programming genius, John Carmack, who revolutionized the computer-games industry in the mid-90's with the seminal shoot-'em-ups Doom and Quake, two of the biggest sellers of all time. The pair made millions, bought several Ferraris each and turned Dallas into the blood-and-guts capital of their industry. Though they have since broken up in a spat over precisely what makes a computer game cool, to hard-core fans they are still gods -- the Paul McCartney and John Lennon of our business,'' says a Dallas game developer who insists on being identified only as Levelord.

If computer games are all about blurring the line between fantasy and reality, so is the business that produces them -- and no one exemplifies this better than John Romero. A controversial figure even in gaming circles, he has so dominated his world that he's inclined to treat his critics with all the respect that Hiro Miyamoto affords the huge, slimy maggots and robotic frogs with venomous tongues that cross his path.

To ride in Romero's passenger seat as he swerves in and out of traffic at warp speeds offers the same delirious, stomach-churning feeling you get from watching him play Daikatana. Romero is relishing his pumped-up status. ''When I drive this car,'' he says, ''people know who I am.'' He chafes at waiting for a table for half an hour at a crowded Dallas lunch spot. (''If they knew I was here, we wouldn't have to wait.''). He imagines his reception in Japan, where he's never been but where his games are huge. ''I'd probably get mobbed by Japanese chicks,'' he says.

Shortly after Romero split up with Carmack and left their company, Id Software, he scored a $25 million advance in 1996 from Eidos Interactive, a London-based game publisher. Romero immediately plunged $2 million into renovating the glass-bubble penthouse floor of the Texas Commerce Tower, one of the most prestigious office addresses in Dallas. Today, oilmen who worked their whole lives to get into the Petroleum Club on the 40th floor find themselves sharing the elevators with the 90's version of Texas wildcatters -- techie 20-somethings wearing nose rings and cutoff shorts.

Ion Storm is an astonishing place, like something out of a ''Jetsons'' cartoon -- with walkways suspended above a maze of stainless-steel cubicles, wall lighting embedded in marble sconces, glass cases filled with models of one-eyed monsters, the whole enterprise wrapped in clouds and sky. It bustles with 88 employees, including screenwriters and producers, developing three games at once and making plans to branch into movies, action figures, comic books and clothes. There are leather couches and giant projection screens, a locker room with showers, Ping-Pong and pool tables, a million-dollar recording studio for making game soundtracks and a special area for death-matching that's linked to 16 television sets in a nearby spectators' lounge. And, of course, all the junk food you can eat.

It's a dream clubhouse for game freaks, the kind Romero could have only imagined as a kid drawing violent cartoons of superheroes, hanging out in the video arcades and flunking his classes. While growing up in Tucson, Ariz., and Rocklin, Calif., Romero was pretty much left to whatever engaged his imagination -- until, Romero says, his angry stepfather, a retired military officer named John Schuneman, crept up behind him while he was playing an arcade game and smashed his face into the glass. One of Romero's recurring cartoon characters was Melvin, a crew-cut kid who was always getting blown away by his dad.

Then Schuneman noticed his stepson's fascination with computers and bought him an Apple II+. Romero became a brilliant programmer, with no interest in anything besides making games, and eventually made his stepfather proud. After high school, he bounced around several game companies before landing a job at Softdisk in Shreveport, La. There he hooked up with Carmack, a teen-age prodigy from Kansas City. In 1991, the two split off to found Id Software and moved to Dallas to form a partnership with Apogee Software, a company pioneering the use of the Internet for distribution, instead of merely relying on floppy disks sold in stores or through the mail. Their first game, Wolfenstein 3-D, is considered the original first-person shooter, letting players shoot Nazis in dungeons adorned with swastikas and pictures of Adolf Hitler. It was an instant smash, bringing in about $120,000 a month in sales.

The boys were astounded. They were getting rich playing games! But something wasn't quite right about Wolfenstein. ''Everybody thought it was awesome,'' Romero recalls. ''But when we started playing, it was like, 'We have to have more blood, more violence in there.' It seemed real, but we needed to show the guys dying.' ''

Their next game, Doom, had a seismic impact on the computer-game industry when it was released in 1993, just as the Internet was coming of age. Id's marketing was brilliant. You could download the first stages or ''levels'' of Doom free. But once addicted, you couldn't get the whole game unless you forked over a credit card number. So many people tried to download Doom that it crashed the computer system at the University of Wisconsin, on which it was posted.

Doom spawned an entire generation of computer-gamers, from geeky kids making a beeline to their PC's after school to office workers flipping back to their spreadsheets whenever the boss walked by. Doom and Doom II have sold about 2.7 million copies in the United States, over the Internet or through retail stores (as most software is distributed). Though it's impossible to know for sure how many free copies of the opening levels were downloaded worldwide, some estimates range as high as 20 million.

As the first three-dimensional game playable over a computer network, Doom created a subculture of hard-core gamers. By intentionally leaving cracks in his source code, Carmack encouraged Doomers to hack the game and create their own elaborate levels -- new battlegrounds upon which the carnage took place. ''Nobody had ever seen anything as cool as Doom,'' says Romero. ''The music, the sound effects, how scary it was, the attitude, weapons balance, everything was perfect about that game.''

But even as Doom and its successor, Quake, became wildly successful, a fundamental disagreement erupted between their creators about what made a computer game great. Was it Carmack's specialty, the programming advances that allowed for increasingly fast and realistic play? Or the cooler stories, weapons and monsters that Romero dreamed up? ''You don't watch a movie because it's 35 millimeters or 70 millimeters,'' Romero says. ''It's the idea of the movie.'' That was when Romero started to succumb to what Carmack calls the ''rock-star stuff'' -- maneuvering for fame instead of working hard (a charge Romero denies).

As nerves frayed, there wasn't much question about which one would have to go. Doom was a huge hit not because of its ''plot'' -- something about a marine stationed on a moon base that was so lame that even people at Id can't recall how it goes -- or even the scary creatures and artsy backdrops. The key was Carmack's magnificent software, the ''engines'' -- the underlying operating systems that take full advantage of increasing computer power and made him a programming cult figure. (''If hard-core gaming ever had a god,'' gushes the Web site Gamespot, ''John Carmack is it.'') Romero was handed his resignation and asked to sign it in 1996 -- though with characteristic bravado he says he planned to leave anyway to start his own shop.

In nearly every way imaginable, the shy, 28-year-old Carmack is the anti-Romero. Id Software's offices are hushed and contain only a bare-bones staff of 15 producing one game -- Quake III, due out this summer. The phone number is not listed, and even if you happened to stumble upon the black cube building on L.B.J. Highway in the suburb of Mesquite, there's no mention of the company in the lobby's directory. This is not an oversight. ''I wish the world would pretty much leave me alone,'' says Carmack. While Romero has yet to earn a penny through Ion Storm, Id's revenues in 1997, the year Quake II came out, were $28 million, a staggering $2 million per employee. With only small overhead -- mostly salaries and computers -- fully 80 percent of that is profit.


For Romero's next venture, Daikatana, he has actually had to license Carmack's technology. In fact, one of the things that held up the game, now scheduled to reach stores this winter, was the wait for Carmack to release his latest engine. Why that's important becomes clear when you sit down to play.

Sitting at a computer at Ion Storm, Romero expertly leads a visitor through Doom, and at first it's hard to understand what all the fuss is about -- fuzzy figures attacking, a crude pistol firing, splotches of red appearing on falling bodies. Then he starts playing Quake I and II, the next stops in his historic tour of the first-person shooter. The ''story'' doesn't change much, but as Romero moves through 1996 and 1997 the games gradually enter new dimensions of realism. You can see Carmack's programs becoming more sophisticated and taking advantage of the soaring processing speed of computers and powerful 3-D graphics-accelerator cards. By the time Romero reaches Daikatana, the illusion is truly remarkable.

*stuff deleted cause it was boring*

Littleton may fade into the background, but this business will surely continue to grow, and John Romero will want a bigger share of it. So he is pulling all-nighters to finish an Internet-only demo of Daikatana, the game that could confirm or destroy his legendary reputation. It was originally scheduled to compete against Carmack's Quake II during Christmas of 1997 but has been delayed so many times that Romero is becoming the subject of ridicule in the gaming press. Now the consensus is that he'll be lucky to get it out by this Christmas, two years behind schedule. Even his publicity agent, Heidi Davis, says: ''The feeling out there is: 'O.K., we've been reading about John Romero. Where's the game?' ''

Slurping a bowl of tortilla soup in a Dallas restaurant, Romero is fed up with the criticism. Daikatana will give fans an ''awesome'' ride through 4,485 years of human history, he says, armed with more weapons of annihilation that will destroy more monsters than ever before. ''Nobody's made one like this before,'' he says, ''and I doubt that anyone's ever going to try to make something this big again.''

What's complicating things for Romero is that computer gaming, no less than music and film, is a ruthlessly hit-or-miss business. The more time and money he spends, the more games he must sell to earn back his advance. And the market has become far more competitive since his last hit three years ago, with Quake I. Romero's fantasy company has spent $30 million and produced but one game, a strategy-war game called Dominion that was an utter flop. His company has teetered on the verge of meltdown -- a power struggle resulted in the firing of two top executives, and scores of developers have jumped ship -- and if Romero doesn't deliver soon, speculation is rampant that Eidos, the company that has backed him, will pull the plug.

''They will not pull the plug,'' he cries, flatly predicting that Daikatana and two other Ion Storm titles will pull down total sales of between $70 million and $90 million this year. Now, of course, he can add to his list of woes a new marketing climate in which developers like him are perceived as being at least partly responsible for the killings at Columbine High.


As the dinner crowd arrives, Romero gets up and heads out the door. His stardom depends on Daikatana, and he knows his time is running out. While he has been death-matching in his dream clubhouse, the real world keeps changing.

Hiro Miyamoto's back is against the wall. The world is swarming with giant robotic rats trying to get a piece of him. ''People can say what they want,'' Romero says.

Lunch over, Hiro hops into his yellow spaceship and speeds off to his spectacular glass bubble in the sky, where he can still be lord of the universe, grab an Ion Blaster and blow Superfly Johnson into a million pieces.

Daikatana.

Four years in the making and guess what: it is not going to be perfect. Reading about the chaos that was Ion Storm over the last four years it is amazing that they still pushed on and got the product out the door. With the departures and the egos and then finally a team coming together to finish the game, I am looking forward to see what they will produce next. And with all of the work that this group did in just a few months, I bet the next game will take very little time to finish.

Did Romero do any of the level design?

Or was he a supervisor?
I don't understand what his role was at Ion Storm.

heh. daikatana costs a mere 3 dollars more than the Q3 mission pack will. i don't know quite what to think of that.

Well, you won't EVER find me defending User Friendly. That comic is a steaming turd. Jesus, that new corporate shit they have up? Goddamn, that guy cannot fucking draw. I could stick a pencil up my ass and scribble better comics onto toilet paper.

PA looks nicer, but the content is just as bad. The only difference is that it appeals to the "gamer" crowd, instead of the "alternate OS" crowd. The "gamer" crowd is entertained by poop jokes and UT vs Q3 debates, so writing something that is entertaining to that subset is like shooting fish in a barrel.

I bet everyone points and laughs at JR. This game is a joke for the 4 years it took to make.

It will be interesting to see how Daikatana sells. If it does well, be prepared to have companies start hyping their games long before release.

Now the game has to be released to the public. Sure it is Gold, but that means didly-squat until it hits the shelves.

Number of times I have laughed at any Penny-Arcade comics: 0

I personally can't believe how hard the PA guy rags on other online comics. PA takes little to no effort or talent to squeeze out, and it's just plain not funny. Ragging on other comics just makes him look like an ass. Kettle, meet pot. Pot, kettle.

I would love to see Romero.. pimping Daikatana...at E3... and no one is paying any attention.

Number of times the Penny-Arcade "laugh" cartoon has been linked here:

46,674

Number of times I have laughed at this cartoon:

0

Come up with something new, guys.

There's a cure for the Daikatana Flu. Simply uninstall the Demo and re-load Half-Life.

There, feel better?

Thanks!

-Lex

Romero was the "designer", responsible for the entire thing, likely including storyline, weapons, enemies, and a good deal of the map ideas. Not all of it, but the general "idea man". Like Devine at id.

who cares if romero is there promoting the game, give us the killcreek breasts! these are the things we want to see...

Wow... at E3 again... thats so sad... You know who i hope rolls by him while he's standing there watching the spot light on everything and anything else... i hope the Penny-arcade guys walk on past stop... and just startmaking comic strips.. strips like this one :

http://www.penny-arcade.com/laugh.shtml

]=)

Daikatana...




hahahaha