John Romero released
John Romero's Daikatana to the applause of game players across America in 2000. The applause only lasted until the first load screen. The game was almost fated to be a lost gesture from the first interview.
Daikatana is the perfect example of over hyped games that all potential computer programmers should be learning from. Every time a company brings out a "hot property" like Daikatana there is a large amount of buzz, and rightly so, but there was a simple error.
The problem comes in when Daikatana when the creator of the game is John Romero, the computer programmers biggest egomaniac. Unfortunately John Romero created Doom and Doom II along with Quake, then when he split off to create his own company called Ion Storm, Romero believed he was infaliable as did many people.
John Romero proceed to call the game perfect, and make it sound like it is the next Quake, or Doom, and the ultimate game. The hype snowballed and the gamers believe they were getting an ultimate game. Unfortunately the first problem appeared, a delay.
Then before the game came out there was many ads for it, the most popular was “John Romero's going to make you his bitch” in big one page ads all over the gaming magazines.
Ion Storm's division under John Romero would start to accrue many delays while building Daikatana. The final total building time was 3 years perhaps more. Then when it was released, Daikatana was far behind the industry, looking more like a Doom clone then anything. There was a poor AI System, coupled with the worst graphics of its time, and insane difficulties, the game was lambasted and taunted, and finally fell to the unfortunate effects of being over hyped, while it was still under production. The game almost killed Ion Storm, ruining John Romero's reputation, and wasting a large amount of resources.
After Daikatana, the company went through some restructuring, as well as Ion Storm closing one branch of its offices and ended up letting Romero go. In addition the word was out that John Carmack was the genius behind Id Software's rise to fame.
A final note is that Ion Storm is recovering thanks to the excellent guidance of Warren Spector, creator of many of the hits of the industry. The newest games are currently Deus Ex, and its sequel set to arrive in February 2003.
Part of the node the worst games ever project