The Hall of Shame 11.28.07: Daikatana

Posted by Vincent Chiucchi on 11.28.2007

This column is about to make you it's bitch

When people talk about the greatest first person shooters of all time, they'll always bring up Doom. Doom was a revolutionary title that paved the way for other popular series, and it was brought to us by John Romero. Romero founded id Software, the company that made Doom, and would go on to make two other landmark FPS titles, Wolfenstein 3D and Quake. Eventually John Romero would form his own company, Ion Storm, where their motto was "Design is Law." Romero would begin work on what was supposed to be the next big FPS title that everyone was going to love. But unfortunately, massive delays, way too much hype, and one of the worst marketing slogans in history would lead to the downfall of Romero's next big title. In this week's Hall of Shame, we look at the game that was supposedly going to make us suck Romero's dick; Daikatana.

So once Ion Storm announced they were going to make Daikatana, the marketing for the game immediately began. Just a few weeks into the development of the game, John Romero was already appearing in TIME Magazine and Newsweek with the game receiving massive hype because it was from the guy that made Doom. In fact, most of the marketing campaign for Daikatana was based on John Romero, especially the infamous quote that appeared in many magazines. Instead of having gamers wanting Romero's latest masterpiece, it was alienating them. The infamous quote:

"John Romero's About to Make You His Bitch. Suck It Down."

Okay, take a look at that quote and tell that doesn't sound more like what some arrogant fanboy of Romero's would say to you instead of a marketing ad. I guess the people behind this ad thought it would be cool to appeal to us in a fanboy kind of way, but didn't realize that fanboys are amongst the most hated people in the gaming community. Or maybe in the late 90's the game industry really hated gamers for some reason. I mean this was in the same year Game.Com had that commercial where the blue-haired midget says the handheld plays more games then we have brain cells. Is it any coincidence that the Game.Com was also such a massive failure? I hope you marketers out there are taking notes on this.

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. So maybe this change for Daikatana would really be a good thing?

It probably would've if Ion Storm wasn't already falling apart. The company was wasting money and morale was falling apart. Morale got so bad at one point that twelve people working on Daikatana wound up quitting, meaning the game would not be released in 1998. Ion Storm promised the game would be released on February 15, 1999, but the game was delayed again. After months and months of struggling with their issues, Ion Storm was FINALLY ready to release this game in 2000. In that three year span the game had gone through two different game engines, five lead programmers, people coming and going, and had wound up costing the company $30 million to make. This pattern of long delay and huge spending was going to become a pattered that Ion Storm copied for their future titles.

Apparently not, because Daikatana sucked. So what was ultimately wrong with the game?

The writing in the game is terrible. At one point characters are talking to each other in a graveyard and one of them says he has a bad feeling about what's going to happen. This would be fine if it weren't for the fact that he just fought hundreds of zombies moments ago. The RPG elements in the game are also a waste because even when you increase your stats it makes little to no difference in the change of gameplay. Graphics wise, the game was using the Quake II engine which at that time was becoming dated since games that were about to come out started using the Quake III and Unreal Tournament engines.

The biggest problem with this game is the really terrible AI, and it isn't only in the monsters you fight, but also with the sidekicks that you have to make sure don't die or else the game ends. This becomes a problem because your sidekicks are so damn stupid. A lot of the time they'll just ignore every single command you give them, and it doesn't help that sometimes they'll get themselves stuck on a wall, start shooting at you, or other acts of mental retardation until they ultimately wind up killing themselves because they squashed to death by a closing door, or worse, something stupid like not getting off the treadmill before the hamburger patty pushed them into the grinder.

No, I am not making this up:


Since most of time you're going to get a game over because of your dimwitted companions, the save system becomes atrocious. You can only save the game when you collect a save gem and can hold up to three save gems at once. But say in where an RPG would have save points usually before or after boss fights, the gems appear in odd locations and is not very consistent.

So overall, Daikatana was just a mediocre game that was heavily lashed at for all the major hype that Romero and Ion Storm had put behind it.

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 also 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.

Since then Ion Storm went on to make other games that actually turned out to be good (Deus Ex and Thief), but it still couldn't recover from the damage caused by internal politics and John Romero's ego and in 2005 went out of business. John Romero would then go on to found Monkeystone Games, a company basically known for nothing and sank even faster then Ion Storm.

But folks, you've yet to hear the weirdest part about all this. That marketing quote about us being Romero's bitch? According to John Romero book "Masters of Doom", Romero said when he was shown this ad and was unsure about the idea, marketer Mike Wilson told him "Don't be a pussy."

Let that be a lesson for you kids: "Don't give in to peer pressure." Otherwise, you'll just wind up as somebody's bitch.

Speaking of hyping, I'm going to do some myself. We're quickly reaching the end of 2007, a year that's seen many positives and many negatives. But seeing how this is the Hall of Shame, you know which side I'm going to be focusing on. By the end of the year I'll be doing the "Top 10 Shameful Moments of 2007", a look back at what I feel was the worst things to have happened in the past 365 days or so. I really want to make this a special column, so I just might have to skip a couple weeks in order to make it a good one. What moments will go down as the worst of 2007 in gaming? Stay tuned by the end of the month to find out.