Unbeknownst to us, a small warhead was headed in Ion Storm’s direction. 7th Level, Todd’s previous workplace, sued Ion Storm, alleging Todd and Jerry left the company in a bad position with both G-Nome and Dominion unfinished. As a part of the suit, I was deposed by 7th Level’s lawyers. How long had I known Todd? How long had I been planning to bring him on as a partner before he joined the company? Did I know any of 7th Level’s employees? The questions went on for three hours. We weren’t worried, though, because we hadn’t done anything wrong, and fortunately, they dropped the suit. It wasn’t a great way to start the year, but we shrugged it off and went back to work on our games.
As the highs and lows of January rolled into February, I started looking for people to join my team.
“I’m starting work on my new game,” was how I started each email. From there, everything was customized and targeted toward level designers or programmers whose work I had played and respected. On the level design side, I started with popular level designers like John Anderson, who made levels for both The Ultimate DOOM and Master Levels for DOOM II, as well as Matt Hooper, who worked with Hipnotic Software on Scourge of Armagon. I also reached out to Steve Rescoe, who was a good Quake level designer, making Shadow Over Innsmouth, and Sverre Kvernmo, a DOOM mapper who worked on Eternal DOOM and the Master Levels for DOOM II. All four joined the team. On the programming side, getting a lead coder was my top priority, and so I hoped Kee Kimbrell would join us. I had one concern, though—his boss and founder of DWANGO, Bob Huntley. Bob had a good history, and I didn’t want to crater his company by approaching his number one coder. As it turned out, Bob was actually okay with it. The availability of the internet was displacing those using traditional dial-up, and if I took Kee, it would save him a lot of money. Kee joined the team in February.
With critical members of the team starting to fall into place, I targeted a late-1997 completion date for Daikatana. Rather than roll our own—creating a new engine from scratch—we planned to use the Quake engine. The advantage was clear. First, I believed it was still the most advanced engine on the market, and I knew it would be a while before something more advanced came along to take its place. Second, it would relieve the team of the all-tech upheavals that so many companies were facing by creating their own engines. Last, I knew everything there was to know about how it worked, and we could start developing gameplay immediately. I contacted Jay at id, asked about licensing the engine, and got a quick reply: $500K. We agreed—it would have cost far more to develop our own tech—and they sent over a CD with all the source code on it.
I anticipated the team would be at thirty people by the time we were fully ramped up, and I calculated the number of assets I hoped to include, how long it would take to create those assets, and how long it would take to integrate them into the game with code. I felt confident that with a team of thirty and a finished engine, we could hit my target completion date at the end of 1997. I didn’t expect to do any engine modifications, so what was ahead of us was gameplay programming and asset creation. Things felt like they were coming together.
In early March, shortly after we closed the deal with id, Jay left for Epic Games. I gathered from Jay what I had heard from others—that the mood had turned somber and dark after I left, and it wasn’t fun for him anymore. In addition, Mike Wilson being gone meant he was the sole business person again, and he did not want to deal with the crushing demands that the newly released Quake had brought, similar to the deluge we faced after DOOM and DOOM II. id was not going to hire more people in business, so he had enough of that and quit. I wished Jay well, and I was sure that both Mark Rein and Tim Sweeney were delighted to have Jay join them. Jay remains at Epic to this day. On my side, there wasn’t any gloating over people leaving id. I knew that the company would survive, and as a cofounder, even if I wasn’t there, I still wanted to see it succeed.
At Ion Storm, we remained both excited and focused. I finished the Daikatana design document and talked over its design with Tom. I felt that it was ambitious, but at the same time, its content roadmap was what I felt the FPS genre needed to mature. While we had deprioritized story in DOOM and Quake, as design director I felt a better story could be told when a game felt like an exciting rollercoaster, where the player discovered new content constantly and felt that their actions led to that.
As I said to Tom, “Why am I fighting the same enemy in the last level as I fought in the first level? Why aren’t there new enemies throughout the game?” Moreover, why wasn’t there a narrative design to pair with the game design?
I felt that narrative design was an area where FPS games fell behind their peers in other genres. At the time, shooters were still emerging, and the “graphics arms race” was on. Teams were competing to produce the best-looking and fastest shooters, with id being the clear front-runner. Some games, like Duke Nukem 3D, were pushing forward character design. Games like Eidos’s own Tomb Raider, while not a shooter, showed how some components of a shooter could be married with narrative and character design to create a richer experience. For Daikatana, since we were using a licensed engine, it was imperative we differentiate in design. As a part of that, I wanted an epic storyline with time travel, fleshed-out characters, and many twists and turns. Feeling secure in the design and excited about the narrative’s innovative potential, I hoped the industry would take note. While we still had yet to bring on a writer, I figured the story would require a body of assets to carry it, and so I planned for sixty-four monsters, twenty-four levels, and twenty-five weapons.
As the design gelled and the teams started to build, Mike Wilson came up with his first marketing plan, a “No Excuses” press tour where we would talk about our promise: If we screw this up, there were no excuses, because we were getting as much money and time as we needed to create the best games we could make. The primary goal was to get us in the media more, to elevate awareness around our new brand and the games we were making. It was a bold move, sure, but Mike had success with bold moves like id’s Judgment Day, and we trusted him and his intuition. The No Excuses press tour landed us in some major magazines, including TIME and Newsweek later in the year.
Seeing ourselves in their pages, Tom and I felt the first pangs of concern. The June 23, 1997, TIME article proclaimed, “Everything Game Designer John Romero Touches Turns to Gore. And to Gold.” It covered my history with id, our breakup, and touted all the things we thought would be great about Daikatana.*
“It’s way too early for this,” I said.
Tom looked up from TIME and nodded. “Yeah.”
“I need to focus on making the game.”
While we felt confident in our designs, and we had strong track records, there were a thousand ways for things to go wrong in the execution. Beyond that, companies close, relationships crumble, health fails. Coders at our core, we knew there were far too many variables to be flying our flag so high.
Looking at the magazine open in front of Tom, I added, “I can’t believe I wore fucking shorts. Stupid.”
The hype train was just warming up as we headed into April. In another attempt to build awareness for the company and embrace the hard-edged nature of first-person shooters, Mike thought we needed to make a huge statement before the Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3. The expo was the see-and-be-seen event of the game industry calendar, with companies setting up booths to show off their current games and to announce their upcoming releases. GT Interactive had a huge Quake booth in 1996, the year after the show first started. E3 was closed to the public and open only to members of the press and industry, and it drew tens of thousands of attendees to the Los Angeles Convention Center each year. Mike contacted Richards Group R&D, the same group that worked on id’s advertising, and we were fortunate enough to land Sasha Shor, the ad executive who created the Quake packaging, font, and logo.
Mike was thrilled at the advertisement she created. I suspect readers already know what the advertisement was.
John Romero’s About to Make You His Bitch.
Suck It Down
Mike brought the ad to me. It was evident that he was hyped by what he saw. I looked at the ad, blinked, and leaned back in my chair. I laughed, a weird uncomfortable laugh.
“I mean, that’s not something I would say, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“You say all kinds of shit when you’re deathmatching!” he replied.
“But I wouldn’t say that. I don’t think people reading the ad will think it’s cool or funny. It’s insulting and makes me sound like an asshole. I wouldn’t say that.”
“Don’t be a pussy,” Mike said.
“It’s my name on the ad.”
I scrolled back through Mike’s advertising campaigns in my head. He thought outside the proverbial box, and I had to admit that his efforts got results.
“I wouldn’t say something like that,” I repeated.
The look on Mike’s face said only one thing: It’s fucking awesome.
I begrudgingly agreed. “Okay, marketing is your job, so I guess I’ll let you do it.”
Mike left the office, ecstatic.
As the Bitch ad made its way toward publication, more buzz about Ion Storm appeared in Computer Gaming World, then the number-one publication for the game industry, the Wall Street Journal, and Fortune. TIME put me in the magazine again and named me one of the fifty Cyber Elite. Fortune called Ion Storm one of the country’s twenty-five “Cool Companies.” On the one hand, it was great to see that people had such interest. It certainly helped with our recruiting for prospective team members. On the other hand, Tom and I felt it was too much too soon. We should be making games, not press, especially since the “No Excuses” line had been drawn in the sand. We’d already had plenty enough time in the spotlight.
Not everyone, it seemed, felt that way. Todd wanted to be promoted in ads, too, so he asked Mike how that could happen. Mike contacted our PR firm, TSI Communications, and they workshopped a few ideas before landing on a series of “image ads” of the Ion Storm top level team: Mike, Bob, and us four founders. The image ads looked like film strips with three to four photos of us on each strip.
Seeing the proofs, I felt it was ridiculous and said so. “Why are we doing this? We’re not advertising our games. It just looks pretentious.”
Others pushed back. “It’s new. Don’t worry about it. No one’s done it before, and it’s cool.”
It was new, and no one had done it before, that was true. But was it necessary? An argument was made that Tom and I were so closely associated with id that we needed to establish our own brand as a company, and, as I understood it, Todd didn’t want Ion Storm to be known as just “John and Tom’s” company. I didn’t buy that.
“I think the game is the brand, and if the game does well, people will know about the people behind the game,” I said.
As founders, our goals were split. Tom and I were not comfortable with Todd’s apparent vision of what we needed to be focusing on at the start, particularly the image ads. All the hype in such high-profile places created more pressure for us than pleasure. I thought about the EA “We See Farther” advertisement from 1983, which featured eight game developers who created games published by EA. To me, that ad was an exception. The ad was selling EA as a company in an attempt to lure other software artists to join them. That made sense. This? Less so.
We believed press and players were interested in the games we were developing, and so returned to that as our focus. In April, we announced via press release that Tom Hall was working on his new game, Anachronox. It began, “Ion Storm isn’t just playing around.” The press loved it, but news of the company itself was still center stage. Ken Brown at Computer Gaming World called Ion “the most exciting new company in computer gaming.”
And then the “Bitch” ad dropped.
It was like a needle being scratched across a record. The reaction was swift and visceral. Entire armies of online fans pivoted into righteously angry mobs typeshouting, “Who the fuck does John Romero think he is?” Game developers who once respected me turned away. Pissed off op-ed pieces appeared on fan sites and forums. The ad hit as far off marketing’s mark as possible. I felt terrible, of course, but there was no coming back from it. No amount of “Yes, that was a dumb idea” and “We shouldn’t have done that” was going to save it. (I’ll share some reflections on this later.)
In spite of the swirling “Bitch ad” mayhem, we pushed forward with hiring for our three teams. I planned to staff mine mostly from the mod community. At this point, I already had three modders on the team, and I was on the lookout for even more. I knew the mod community was passionate about making levels—after all, they made levels for free for the pure pleasure of it. We had received a ton of résumés and sample levels, and I was busy playing through those while also taking note of modders getting a lot of attention in the growing DOOM and Quake communities.
Daikatana was designed to have four episodes: “Future Japan,” “Ancient Greece,” “Medieval Norway,” and “Near-Future San Francisco,” and we were moving forward on their designs. The level designers were up to speed with the level editor, QERadiant, and we decided to focus on making a map in episode three, the Medieval Norway Plague Village. Kee had spent a month learning the Quake codebase and was changing the menu system to Daikatana’s look as we approached our upcoming E3 demo milestone in early June. It was a short time frame between the start of the game’s development and its E3 debut, but we were determined to make as good an “early look” showing as possible. We included explosive barrels, a crossbow, a snow weather effect, and made sure all the movement felt like a fast-action FPS.
With our three games—Daikatana, Anachronox, and Doppelganger—on track at Ion Storm, Mike approached us in early May with an idea to grow the company. He wanted to start a publisher, and he even had a name for it: Ion Strike.
“We already have a deal for six games with Eidos,” I said. “That will keep us busy for at least four years. It doesn’t make any sense to start a publisher right now.”
Mike wasn’t so sure. He thought if we hurried up and got through our initial three games, we could start making games and publishing them for ourselves. The funding model in the game industry traditionally looks like this: Publishers put up the money to develop, publish, and market the game, usually dividing up the development payments over many performance-based milestones. In return for their investment, they recoup a multiplier of that money via game sales, usually two, three, or even four times their investment. Once that’s recouped, developers start seeing royalties on sales. From a financial standpoint, publishers take the lion’s share of the risk, and due to this also take the lion’s share of the revenue
Regardless of the perceived potential upside, we didn’t have the means, money, or manpower to start a publisher at the time. Publishers also had active accounts with all the big box retail and distribution companies, something that was critical back in the mid-1990s before there was widely available digital distribution on platforms like Steam. I appreciated his initiative, but it wasn’t something we could do. It just didn’t feel like a cool move to create our own publisher to compete with a publisher that had just committed $22 million to our development studio.
It wasn’t a decision we could dwell on because we were all hands on deck for our first trip to E3 to show off Daikatana. There’s no way to overstate the spectacle of E3. Every major publisher has a booth set up, each with banks of monitors showing off the latest games. The audioscape is sometimes deafening, with multiple games competing for attention across expansive aisles. Company representatives are handing out T-shirts, headbands, posters, and press kits while meeting rooms are available to give hands-on, private demos to select media. While the show floor is open during working hours, the dinner meetings, post-dinner meetings, and the after-hours networking go on late into the night. Mike had arranged for us to have a massive Daikatana booth—funded by Eidos but ours alone. The booth was constructed of an open metal frame with a large gray-and-auburn wall behind it. Multiple machines allowed people a chance for hands-on play, and TV monitors were hung high so others could watch. There were even character standees in the booth for people to pose next to and get their picture taken with.
After three months of work using the Quake engine, we were happy to give people their first look at Daikatana, albeit one without any monsters—just a snow level with weapons and barrel explosions working. The goal was to let the press see that we were in active development and give them a feel for the environmental design of the game and to discuss plans for its overall game design. (By the standards of any other game, showing off Daikatana at this early state was highly unusual, but we had also been open about the start of its development, and our marketing had been aggressive in getting knowledge of our company and games out there.)
During a break, I took a tour of the show floor, looking at games that were on display from other companies. I was, of course, particularly curious to see what id was showing, and headed over to their booth. Even from ten feet away, I could see that something different was on the screen, and everything else faded into the background. It was Quake II.
It looked amazing—next-level amazing. After a year of development, Quake II featured colored lights and showed off 3D acceleration. Comparatively speaking, Daikatana looked bad in software-rendered mode. There is no way I can release Daikatana in 1997 with Quake tech, I thought. It would look ancient in comparison! I decided right then to delay it so that I could use Quake II’s engine. Obviously, I’d have to talk with id about it, but no matter what, Daikatana couldn’t go out the door looking like it was from the last tech century. I complimented Kevin on the engine improvements, told him I was blown away, and that I’d follow up about the license after.
The show continued. There were a lot of interviews, and I saw lots of other games, but for me, E3 was really about Quake II. It’s as if I had seen only one game and talked to only one person.
Our teams were growing, and we needed to get a bigger office space than our current twenty-person box in the Quadrangle. Mike was out searching for spaces, and in late June told us he’d found a perfect spot for our growing company: the fifty-fourth and fifty-fifth floors of the Chase Tower. Seeing the space was breathtaking—it sported a panoramic view of Dallas and the fifty-fifth floor even had a glass ceiling. It had also never been occupied before. It wasn’t usable as an office yet because it was all cement floors with glass walls and ceilings, but it was a beautiful space. Nonetheless, I was hesitant. I recalled the offices I had visited during our pitching tour. Activision’s and Origin’s offices were grand, and they definitely made an impression, which from a marketing point of view was important. As a development company, though, I wasn’t sure we needed that. I expressed my hesitation, not just about the scope of the place, but about its price tag and the amount of money it would take to turn the space from its current state into something functional for game developers. Even my rough mental estimates were far above what we had budgeted. Mike assured me he would get Eidos to foot the bill for the rent and for renovating the space, and true to his word, he actually did.
He crafted a proposal for Eidos to build out the top two floors of the skyscraper. They agreed to it, enthusiastically even, because they didn’t have a true flagship office to compete with other publishers. The Ion Storm office would be that office, towering above Dallas with a commanding view of its skyline, 360 degrees around. In addition to having the option to hold key meetings there, Eidos planned to house their QA under Ion’s roof. With Eidos on board, we temporarily moved into Chase Tower’s thirtieth floor. It was a substantial office space and necessary with all our new hires coming in. We began working with an architect to get the fifty-fourth and fifty-fifth floors designed, with an estimated move-in date of January 1998. At first, it seemed impossible that we would fill the space, but as our teams began to grow, we knew it was certainly possible.
In early August, Todd heard rumblings that 7th Level was in trouble. Rumor was that they might go bankrupt, and with that, Todd’s former team would be out of their jobs. Seeing a potential opportunity, Todd said he wanted to approach 7th Level about buying Dominion. Purchasing the game, he figured, would get his game done much faster than if he fully developed Doppelganger from scratch. Plus, it would keep people in jobs. From his perspective, it was a win-win-win.
I remembered seeing Dominion when I first visited 7th Level. “How much do you think it will take to finish it?” I asked.
He thought for a minute about where the game was when he last worked on it. As best he could figure, it would take a couple months and $50,000. The game was close to being finished.
Mike was all for it since it got us closer to creating our own publisher. In his eyes, purchasing Dominion “burned an option quickly” if we were able to get it done in just three months.
“I don’t care about ‘burning options,’” I said. “If Dominion has a chance of succeeding soon, then let’s get Dominion, but I don’t want to get Dominion for any other reason.”
I still wasn’t interested in Ion Strike, nor was I ready to move to a publishing business. In fact, I enjoyed working with Eidos because they really believed in us, put up lots of money, and deserved to be rewarded for that. Starting a publishing company would most certainly splinter our focus and derail our efforts to make great games. I also suspected Eidos would kill the deal if we formed a publisher that competed with them, even indirectly.
Todd was confident that he could reach a deal with 7th Level and get Dominion done before returning to work on Doppelganger. Given that the last we heard from 7th Level was via a lawyer and a lawsuit, I was dubious that they’d agree to anything, must less welcome a conversation on it. However, in the end, they did. 7th Level sold us the game for $1.8 million and allowed us to bring on the team. Given that we received $3 million to make the game, it seemed like a wise business move. Particularly if Todd finished the game in the time he stated.
A few months after E3, I reached out to Kevin as promised to discuss the Quake II engine for Daikatana. He wasn’t sure when they would ship exactly, but he hoped it would be by Christmas. All signs were that they were on track, and he thought that we would have the tech in our hands by early 1998. It was ironic to once again be waiting for Quake, albeit Quake II, but the wait was going to be more than worth it. In the meantime, the Daikatana level designers were working in the Quake engine to build out the levels. Once we got Quake II’s source, we would move the levels over into its editor and adjust the levels to show off the new lighting. It would be a bit more work, but we certainly weren’t blocked. We were already seeing the improved lighting in our imaginations.
During this time, Jeff Wand, an artist on the team, got word from a friend of his that the entire Austin office at Looking Glass Studios had been cut loose. That friend had been an artist there. I’d long been familiar with Looking Glass, of course, which was cofounded by Paul Neurath. Years earlier, I had a chance to cofound a company with Paul, when both of us were at Origin. He left to start his own studio, Blue Sky Productions, and I left to start mine. In the years since, Blue Sky Productions had flourished, and their early game, Ultima Underworld, had become a landmark game for RPG players. Ultima Underworld brought the studio a lot of success and renown. Warren Spector, a longtime producer at Origin Systems who worked on everything from Ultima to the Wing Commander series, had left Origin to join Paul at Blue Sky Productions. Eventually, the company merged with another, and its name became Looking Glass Studios, but Warren continued doing what Warren does, making great games. He produced System Shock, which launched in 1994, and became general manager of Looking Glass Austin. In spite of its successes, however, Looking Glass was falling on hard times, and the studio was cutting Warren and his team loose. I knew Warren and knew of his reputation. I wasn’t exactly sure how he got great things done, but I did know that when he was at the helm, games turned out great.
I talked to Mike and Tom, and then called Warren and asked if Mike and I could come down and pitch him on joining Ion Storm.
“I’m just about to sign a deal with EA,” he said. He laughed and added, “Literally. I am holding the pen, and the contract is in front of me.”
“Don’t sign it!” I said. Of course, he was free to do whatever he wanted, but I hoped I could delay his decision. “Let me pitch you on what we can do for you at Ion Storm.”
He agreed, and we wasted no time hitting the road.
Three hours later, I arrived at his Jollyville office and saw his team sitting outside on the steps—ten game devs including Warren. They represented all disciplines and were interested in hearing what we had to say. I wasn’t sure why we weren’t going inside, but I suspected it was because Warren wanted his entire team to be a part of the decision, and they didn’t have a meeting room large enough to hold us. It was a nice day, anyway, so none of us seemed to mind.
At the time, they were working on AIR, the “Austin Internet Roleplaying Game.” They were using the Dark Project game engine. Looking Glass planned to take the source and assets and send it back to the home studio to complete. It’s a somber thing to lose your game, whether it’s canceled, moved to another studio, or, sometimes, released and pushed out the door before it’s ready. Creating a game is a massive effort. You put so much of your creative energy into it, and having that game taken away is painful. I could see that pain on this team’s faces.
I pitched Warren and his team on what we could do for them. Most importantly, I promised Warren he could have the right-size team, a long enough development timeline, and run his own office in Austin, separate from the Dallas office.
“You can do whatever you want, and I will make sure no one gets in your way. You’ll have enough money and enough time. I trust your process.”
He looked at me like he was looking at a unicorn.
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Are you … I have your word? Are you sure? You realize what you’re saying.”
Warren has recounted this moment in many interviews, when he was given not just a green light but a blank check and all the runway he needed.
“Yes, I trust your process.”
“Well, okay then.” He laughed and looked around at his team. They’d gone from the lowest game-dev low—out of a job and having their game taken away from them—to a great high. I really did believe in Warren and his team. I knew that Warren could make a great game if he had the right conditions for success. When I left, Warren and his team were creatively excited and wildly exhausted from the roller coaster they’d been on that day. I was elated that he and his team agreed to join us. I felt like Looking Glass had dropped a diamond in Austin.
Shortly thereafter, Mike headed to the UK for a trade show and, while there, met up with the Eidos execs to lay out our current development plan and trajectory. Eidos had signed us to three games with options on an additional three. In doing so, their expectation was that we would work on three games, and as one neared completion, we would pitch another until our six games were finished. Daikatana, Dominion, and Anachronox were currently in development. Warren’s team at Ion Austin was now working on Deus Ex, then called Shooter: Majestic Revelations. Doppelganger was also still in development, though it was put on pause so Todd could finish Dominion. The last game on the second slate of three was Daikatana 2. According to Masters of Doom, Mike told Eidos, “Here they are. Take them or leave them.”* This put Eidos in a tricky spot. It seemed that Mike hoped they would say no to funding five games simultaneously so that we would be free of the second slate commitment and could move into publishing our own games. Paying for the simultaneous development of five games was a huge investment of cash for Eidos, but also a risky proposition for a new game development studio. Developing three games simultaneously was tricky enough for a new studio. Five was nuts. To add rain to the river, Daikatana had just been delayed, and Dominion wasn’t going to make its hoped for two-months-or-so deadline either! Yet, if Eidos passed on any game, we were free of that option.
Eidos was backed into a corner. After discussing it internally, they called Todd Porter to complain about Mike’s stance. It was obvious they were not pleased. Todd called a meeting of the owners and relayed what he had been told. I think everyone took a moment to take it in and think. We were all concerned about upsetting the sole funder of our games and the ramifications it could have. By now, we were around fifty people including the Austin office, and we wouldn’t have done anything to jeopardize everyone’s employment by pushing our publisher into a corner. I certainly wasn’t interested in losing Eidos. I really liked working with them, and I wanted to stick with them through these first games and then the second slate. It made no sense to me that he would allegedly offer them an ultimatum on the last three games just to “burn those options,” particularly since we had decided against forming a publisher. When Mike returned from the UK, Todd and I met with him and told him to stop upsetting Eidos. As owners, we wanted to stick with them, and we didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize the company. We knew Mike was eager to start a publisher, but now was not the time.
At home, things were good. Beth was still busy setting up our new home and enjoying the space it provided. It was unlike anything either of us had lived in before, something I had designed and had custom built. There wasn’t a day that I didn’t come home and think, I live here? I had a large office where all the game stuff was—my PCs, consoles, pinball machines, and even a pool table—so that it was out of Beth’s view. While she enjoyed the spoils that games brought, having games all over the home was another matter. It was also at this time that we got some wonderful news—she was expecting. We hadn’t been planning on having a child, but we were delighted. Our baby was due in May.
As we headed into the fall, the first visible signs of discontent in the teams began to emerge. While we had had our disagreements as owners, sure, morale in the various teams seemed okay. However, Mike let us know otherwise. He took me and Tom out to lunch and told us point blank: Our teams did not like Todd.
“Our teams? How are they even interacting with Todd?” I asked.
Mike shared a bevy of complaints, most of which took us by surprise. Todd, it seemed, was allegedly a military-style leader, referring to people on his team as units, soldiers, or troops, and ordering them around accordingly. I heard that he apparently called my producer, who initially put him on speakerphone, but quickly muted the call as soon as Todd started yelling. The team also had lesser issues with Jerry and shared concerns about how the art department was run. I was hearing all these complaints secondhand, of course, but in a nutshell it was clear that people didn’t like how they were being treated. The complaints filtered through the teams, and the sentiment turned against them. Truth be told, Tom and I were not big fans of Todd at this point either. There had been lots of minor clashes and differences of opinion over leadership styles and management boundaries. So, we considered our options. The weight of these complaints, our own misgivings, and Dominion’s delay all pointed toward an exit sign.
“So that’s it, then?” I said.
Mike and Tom nodded.
“Okay, then. Next week, I’ll let him go.”
Over the weekend, I thought about what I’d say to Todd, how I’d break it to him. While I trusted Mike’s information, at the same time, I felt Todd deserved a chance. After all, we hadn’t talked to him about any of these issues, and felt it was only fair to allow him an opportunity to improve. Beyond that, Todd was an owner, and it would take a lot to change the ownership structure of the company. If I fire him, how will Eidos take this? I wondered. I felt it was best if we stayed the course. On Monday, I met with Todd to express our concerns and to say the obvious: that people didn’t like a dictatorial style of communication, and that being mean is no way to get a game made. At this point, things were feeling somewhat frayed at the leadership level, except between Tom and me, of course.
“I need to be working on the actual game,” I said to Tom.
“And not playing a turn-based strategy game in, you know, the company,” he said.
“Exactly.”
In December, a friend from Ritual Entertainment contacted me about a fax he’d seen regarding investment in a new publishing company called God-Games. According to the fax, GodGames, which I’d never heard of, was formed by Harry Miller, then-CEO of Ritual Entertainment, and Mike Wilson—our Mike Wilson! My contact shared that Harry had been spending a lot of time talking to Mike lately.
I was livid. Had he started his own publishing company without our knowledge? While still working for us? We knew Mike was eager to start a publishing company, but it wasn’t the right time for Ion Storm to do it. If he’d so desperately wanted to do it on his own, why didn’t he just quit Ion Storm and then do it? I was blown away that this happened behind our backs. How long had this been going on? We held an emergency meeting, and we unanimously agreed on the next course of action.
I drove Mike to our lawyer’s office and fired him there.
Tom and I were so incredibly sad, shocked, and disappointed. We really liked Mike. At best, it seemed uncool. At worst, it was a possible breach of contract with both Ion Storm and with Eidos. We never saw it coming, though in retrospect, Mike was always driven, so maybe we should have.
It was a difficult time. Mike was a trusted part of the team at the leadership level who was responsible for everything from advertising to finding our office space, and I had worked with him since he entered the industry. Lots of people on the team loved him. He was fun to work with, and he cared about people, too. Obviously, in wanting to start a publisher, Mike was determined and knew what he was after. Years later, he would have massive success with Devolver Digital, a publisher that provides a platform for many independent game developers. He’s helped a lot of people along the way. The start at GodGames, however, was problematic for us. When we broke news of his departure to Eidos, not surprisingly, they were relieved. Mike and Ion Storm issued a joint press release in which he discussed his excitement, and I wished the best for him in his new role.*
Quake II launched on December 9, 1997. What I’d seen at E3 was still mesmerizing me, and I couldn’t wait to get the game installed and check it out in action. I spent hours exploring its levels and cataloging the differences between Quake II and its predecessor. All of these were things I needed to consider for Daikatana. I contacted Kevin to congratulate him on the launch and on the incredible reception. It was all anyone was talking about online and even at Ion Storm. I could tell that Kevin was pleased, and by extension, everyone at id. It felt odd to see a series that I had co-created going on without me, sure, but it also felt fantastic to see it going on. There are other ways any of these games could have gone, and I’d rather someone be advancing Wolfenstein, DOOM, and Quake than leave them sitting on a repo to collect dust. The id team had done a fantastic job with Quake II, and I was sure that Carmack was pleased with how it turned out. I couldn’t help but wonder what his next innovation would be. True to id’s pattern, they released a game, then a sequel, and then Carmack started work on a new engine. This would be the first time that I wouldn’t be there on day one.
Kevin let me know that id would provide us with the Quake II source early in the new year, so I talked it over with the team before we broke for the holidays. To my surprise, the team didn’t like the idea of switching engines. They were worried about losing progress and the amount of things that would need to be changed to work in the new engine. I understood their concerns. No one likes to redo work again and again, but I explained my reasoning.
“Daikatana is using last-gen technology. If we don’t switch engines, it will look ancient in comparison, and Quake II is what everyone will be comparing it to. This gives us a huge advantage.”
I demoed the games next to one another. Looking at Quake II next to Daikatana, the team understood why it was critical to switch engines and got on board. We made plans for how we might move our existing game over to the new technology.
As 1997 wound to a close, everyone was ready for a break. The year had been a challenging one, between the inner-company squabbles, the teams not liking their leadership, and most of all, Mike leaving. In all the twists and turns of the year, there was a bright spot, of course—Ion Storm Austin. Warren and his team had begun work on the game that would become Deus Ex.
I could not wait to enjoy some time with the boys, my family, and some games. By now, Michael and Steven were nine and eight, respectively, and we enjoyed playing games together, particularly F-Zero, Super Mario World, and Street Fighter II. They looked forward to welcoming their new baby sister, Lillia. My mom and stepdad visited from California, and I had a blast showing my mom around the local hot spots, and we treated her to a shopping trip. I wish she would have really treated herself, but my mother is, above all things, practical, and so even at my insistence to the contrary, all she got herself was a new pair of shoes.
Closing the door on 1997 was a necessary transition. We were looking forward to the new year and the things that it had in store for us as a company.
In January, we moved into the top floors of Chase Tower. The build-out cost Eidos $2.5 million. It was an incredible space—22,000 square feet across the two floors. Designed by a well-known firm, it had arcade machines, a pool table, a Ping-Pong table, a full THX movie theater, a locker room and shower, a motion-capture stage, and model display cases. The floors in the lobby were custom inset terrazzo. While it was far more elaborate than I expected to be, it wasn’t too far from other flagship spaces I’d toured.*
Still, walking through the doors for the first time, I felt incredibly anxious, the same way I felt when I first drove my Testarossa. I was worried that I had to be not just successful, but hugely successful to pay off the renovations on top of all the other money we were spending on products in development. Even though Eidos agreed to fund the space, it was reasonable to assume that they would want a return on that investment from Ion Storm, currently the sole tenant. Watching the team walk in, the concerns momentarily faded. Everyone was smiling as they passed through the doors. It was genuinely a beautiful space, a space you’d feel good about working in. Everyone moved in with their boxes of figurines, picture frames, and memorabilia. My team was on the fifty-fifth floor on the north side; the Anachronox team took up the south side. The Dominion team was on the fifty-fourth floor’s northeast corner. The first few days were a honeymoon, of sorts, with everyone eagerly checking out the space, playing pool, and taking in the incredible views of the Dallas skyline, especially at night.
Unfortunately, it became apparent almost immediately that the space had not been designed to suit a technology company.
“I can’t see what’s on the screen.”
An artist on the fifty-fifth floor pointed at his monitor. The sun blazed through the glass roof. Whatever was on his screen was washed out.
“I can’t work like this,” he said.
He was right. I couldn’t believe that in all the details of designing the space, from the pool table to the theater, this had been overlooked. Sure, the design firm had crafted canopies over the tops of desks, but the canopies didn’t do the job. We contacted them, and they arranged for huge blinds to be installed along the entire glass ceiling of the office. Even these weren’t opaque enough, and so the space was still bright. The blinds had cost a fortune, however, and Eidos was done paying for solutions. We had to figure out what to do with what we had, and that meant, at least in the short term, getting felt to cover the cubes of people affected by the light. Sadly, this became the long-term solution. What was once a state-of-the-art flagship office was now, at least in part, a tent city.
With Mike gone, we appointed Todd CEO. Dominion was by now complete and on its way through the process of duplication and distribution. It wasn’t a decision of opportunity as much as it was a decision of necessity. More than anything, I needed to focus on Daikatana and Tom needed to focus on Anachronox, not on running the company. Neither Tom nor I were too worried about anything going seriously wrong. After all, any big decisions still required board of director approval.
In February, we got the source for Quake II, and I was eager to dig in. I was surprised that the codebase had changed so much from Quake. I knew there were some changes to lighting and rendering, but the changes to its core tech ran deeper than that. The programmers got it compiling on their PCs, and once everyone had had a look at it, we gathered to plan for our tech and art transition from Quake to Quake II.
Before I could say it myself, Kee spoke up. He had been working on Daikatana as its lead programmer since the beginning and had spent months learning the Quake codebase.
“It’s massively different,” he said. “It’s going to be a lot of work.”
We itemized the work in a spreadsheet to quantify “massively.” Clearly, this was a sign that the project wasn’t going out the door as quickly as we hoped. There’s no such thing as a simple conversion from one engine to another, and this was to be my first hard lesson. Still, as a team, we knew we had to do it or risk having Daikatana look like the game version of Steve Buscemi in 30 Rock saying, “How do you do, fellow kids?” So, we stuck to that plan. We discussed the challenge and problem with Eidos, and they were supportive. We converted our original budget of $3 million per game to a run-rate model that came in at $1.2 million per month and covered all one hundred employees working across our various games. This allowed us more flexibility in our budget to get the games across the line. In spite of the hiccups, there were signs that things were going well in other areas, and we were close to releasing our first game: Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3.
When Todd originally pitched us on acquiring the game, I recall he was sure it would sell a half million units. Its combination of science fiction and military themes was popular among gamers, and he was confident that he could pull off a hit game (or at least a good one). I didn’t have a reason to doubt him—not then, anyway—and builds of the game seemed promising. If anything, I felt we were fortunate to get the game for $1.8 million, particularly considering that Eidos had given us $3 million to make it. The delays took their toll, however, not just on the game itself, but on its ballooned budget and its release date: May 31, 1998. The new release date meant it would launch two months after Starcraft, which was advertising a March 31, 1998, launch date. That concerned us. Starcraft, by Blizzard Entertainment, looked fantastic in every preview, and they had a history of greatness. Afterall, Diablo and Warcraft had owned their genres. Todd and his team continued to work toward their gold master.
Meanwhile, Tom was filling out his Anachronox team with programmers, artists, and designers, some of whom were shared between my team and his. His team had a chill vibe because Tom himself is a laid-back guy, something his team loved about him as a leader. Progress on Anachronox was steady.
Warren and his team had finally outgrown the office I’d seen when I pitched him and had moved into a much bigger space elsewhere in Austin. He even added a reception area like we had in the Dallas office. I visited soon after Warren’s team settled in, and I got to meet his latest hire, lead designer Harvey Smith, who had just come off the game Fireteam. Harvey seemed like a confident, intelligent, and experienced designer. I was happy Warren did such a great job at hiring. His team was learning the Unreal Engine technology while building out Deus Ex.
It’s around this time that I received an email from an old colleague and friend, Ben Gokey. He was still at Raven, and he let me know that the Heretic/Hexen team wanted to leave and make games together. Once I left id, the control of the team at Raven was out of id’s hands, and the various members were split apart and spread out onto three different teams at Raven. The reasoning, Ben told me, was that they made winning games, and if they put some of that “win” onto every team, they might get three winning games out of it. However, that magic was in the original group itself. They really liked working together, and since they couldn’t do that at Raven, they wanted to do it somewhere else. Ben wondered if I had any ideas or opportunities. I gave it some thought.
The opportunity to secure a proven, experienced team for a future project seemed too good to pass up. I talked with Eidos, and we agreed to get started on a prototype for Daikatana II, hoping at some point we might have another game for them to start on or an in-house dev team for them to support. The start-up costs were $250K, and I arranged it. With that in place, they were able to leave Raven and form Human Head Studios.*
In the end, Eidos decided not to continue development on a Daikatana II prototype, and Human Head began work on other projects. The initial funding got them off the ground, though. I’ll always be grateful to them for their work on Heretic and Hexen and for allowing me to play a small part in the studio’s founding.
With lots of things swirling in the air around Ion Storm, my personal life was becoming more settled. I purchased a house for my boys and their mother, Kelly, in McKinney, Texas, and they moved from California. I felt so content having them so close to me. Instead of having to pack in as much as possible over a weekend or on a trip, we were able to spend much more time together. The boys were still into SNES games at the time, and Michael wanted to try out an RPG. I debated which RPG to introduce him to since he was only ten. I didn’t want it to be too systemically complex. So, I started him on Super Mario RPG. He loved it, and so we decided that Chrono Trigger was next. As I mentioned, it’s among my favorite games of all time, and it had the same effect on Michael. Years later, when Michael was twenty-six, I was able to introduce him to Hironobu Sakaguchi, the supervisor of Chrono Trigger, and the look on his face will always stay with me. In that moment, Michael met his hero. While Michael and I played Chrono Trigger, Steven was engaged in early experiments in level design using LEGO. He had a seemingly endless supply of them, and we built castles, manors, machines, and monsters, each with its own story. As a family, we were all looking forward to Lillia’s pending arrival.
She was a beautiful baby, my first girl, and both Beth and I were delighted and grateful. I was planning to take some time off from work to support Beth and spend time with my new daughter. Ion Storm, however, had other plans, and the day after her birth, my team held a meeting with our then-COO Bob Wright. It seems the team had had it with how people were being treated and reportedly shared some patterns of unacceptable behavior and choice phrases Todd had used, more concerns about how Jerry ran the art department, and their frustration that I didn’t do enough to address their issues in the first place. They’d lost faith that I would. I suspect the general state of Daikatana, its delays, and Dominion’s poor reception exacerbated everything. They gave me an ultimatum: If Todd and Jerry didn’t go, my entire team threatened to leave. I thought of Mike who had raised the red flag months earlier. Now, the situation had reached a head at the most inopportune time for me personally, but I also understood that they wouldn’t have taken this step if they didn’t feel they had to. Bob asked them to put it all in writing, and then I was told that he did something which still shocks me whenever I think of it. Rather than calling Tom and me to say he had a team emergency on his hands, he instead allegedly suggested that he could help set them up somewhere else if they quit or were fired.* When Tom got wind of it, he gave me a ring to let me know what was happening. I excused myself from Beth’s room in the maternity ward, took a deep breath, and called Tom back.
“I can’t believe this shit,” is probably what I said. I don’t recall precisely, but the gist of it was that Ion Storm felt like a company that made problems, not games. I fired Bob immediately, and he was formally dismissed on May 19. Bob sued Ion Storm and its partners alleging breach of fiduciary duties on May 22. Masters of Doom, the book by David Kushner, remembers it this way:
On May 13, Sverre, Will, and six other members of Romero’s team asked Bob Wright, Ion’s chief operating officer, whom they had perceived as an ally back when he was working closely with Mike Wilson, to join them for lunch. They had an ultimatum for Romero, they said—Todd and Jerry had to go or they would walk out the door. Bob urged them to put their complaints in writing.
Word about the meeting leaked back to Tom Hall—Bob had told the guys that he could help them to finance their own company if they did quit or get fired. Tom called Romero …
“What the fuck?” Romero screamed when Tom told him about Bob’s interference. “That’s it. Bob fucked with my team. He’s gone.” Bob was fired the next week.
The weight of the corporate struggles was taking its toll. I’d heard plenty of game-dev war stories by this point in my career, but I had a strong feeling that Ion Storm was setting a new low. We had a caustic environment on our hands, and we needed to protect the teams, but as equal owners, we couldn’t just show Todd the door. Tom and I didn’t have the shares to vote him out (our ownership was 50 percent to Todd and Jerry’s 50 percent), and the company couldn’t afford to buy Todd out, either. Tom and I realized that we’d made a critical mistake in handing over 50 percent ownership to Todd and Jerry. So we tried an approach that had yet to succeed—we talked to both Todd and Jerry, more sternly this time, and told Todd to fucking cool it. The situation was causing a lot of damage. I came into the office the next day and met with my team. They were so pissed and frustrated. They wanted something done, and I explained that we were going to do everything we could, but that pledge, as I’d soon see, wasn’t really enough. As game modders and developers, their reasonable expectation was that they would spend their day making games, not hearing an owner yelling at their teammates. The Anachronox team started keeping to themselves more, keeping their heads down, trying to just stay out of the firing lines. News of the increasing instability in Dallas reached Ion Austin, of course, but Warren did what Warren does: He just kept making games, shielding his team via the geographical distance.
Into this maelstrom came Dominion’s retail release. Arriving just two months after the launch of Starcraft, it was doomed. Every review compared it unfavorably to Starcraft’s many strengths, and in light of the poor reviews, we heard that distributors were getting cancelations or changes to larger orders. Sales would certainly be affected. Todd planned to take the Dominion team onto Doppelganger, but Eidos pumped the brakes. There was no way they were going to put any more money into a Todd Porter game after Dominion’s poor showing. The Dominion team was split across the three existing teams—Daikatana, Anachronox, and Deus Ex. As it turned out, unfortunately, Dominion received no good reviews that I recall. For a team that was already feeling down, Dominion’s release was a nail in a morale coffin.
The media and Ion Storm’s fans started to wonder what the hell was happening. The loss of senior leadership roles, a lawsuit, and now a poor release? People started to ask questions and point fingers. Forums sprung up to mock Ion Storm, our games and, of course, me. It was humiliating, but I understood that it was par for the course we were on.
Later that month, the Ion founders met with Eidos to see if they were interested in purchasing a part of the company. In spite of our challenges and rocky first release, Eidos held out hope for our future games. We had been in discussions for some time, but with recent happenings, Tom and I were more eager to finalize it than we had been. By now, Ion Storm had spent $15 million in development across all our games. As is normal in the industry, we would have to recoup a multiple of the $15 million development budget in sales before we would see any royalties. We discussed a deal to give Eidos 19 percent of the company in exchange for forgiving the $15 million development costs. Eidos pushed back, wanting majority control. Obviously, we’d see no money from the deal either way, and it would dilute each owner equally, but it would put the company on better footing. Talks advanced, but in the end, Eidos decided to stay the current course.
Before long, news of the potential deal, as well as its collapse, leaked to the press. Todd took it upon himself to talk to IT and to trace people’s email activity to see who was talking.
“You’ve already got everyone on edge. That’s not going to help,” I said.
“And it’s an invasion of privacy,” Tom added. “I don’t think that’s cool.”
Todd insisted that it was well within our rights to search people’s work email, and, he insisted, wasn’t the leak an invasion of our privacy?
“C’mon. No one is going to send a leak from their work email,” I said. “We employ intelligent people. What’s done is done. Declaring martial law isn’t going to make anything better.”
After the leak, the press could smell blood in the water, It was to be the beginning of a long and storied bad news cycle. Dominion’s failure and Doppelganger’s cancellation were newsworthy tidbits, and various outlets began openly wondering where the much-hyped Daikatana was, predicting its demise as well. Internally, some employees, disgruntled at the general state of affairs and unable to solve institutional problems the normal way (they had brought them to us in management multiple times by now), started to feed the flames. Dallas was such a small scene and mostly a first-person shooter scene, so news traveled quickly through the whisper networks. People were leaving regularly, and I had to fire a senior member of my team who stopped making progress and seemingly spent his days tossing cans over his partition wall and into the space between it and the glass window. (Eventually, he filled the entire space.) It turned out he had started a company on the side months earlier and was spending most of his time working on that. Each loss hit the team hard, as it always does, and it hit me, too, because he was a friend, but he’d left me no choice.
Tom and I felt like we were in freefall, having gone over the edge of a cliff many months ago, an edge that we somehow didn’t see (I see plenty in hindsight!). Our only choice was to keep our eyes open for a branch to grab on to or a safe landing spot for the team and the games. I would have killed for a “reload from your last checkpoint” option. We knew what we needed to do—work on our games and address the team’s demand to get certain individuals out of the company—but we were not able to vote them out or pay them off, not at the current company valuation, anyway. It felt like an all-around no-win situation. We believed then that bringing our concerns before Eidos risked getting everything canceled, so we decided not to do it.
What I wish I could do at this point in the story is to begin the redemption arc and tell you how we found a solution and pulled victory from the jaws of defeat. I want to tell a story that is inspiring, a story where people banded together and saved a company. But Ion Storm’s road leads nowhere but downhill. I learned a lot from it, and I will share some reflections in the coming pages. At this point, though, let me just say that a lot of great people passed through Ion’s doors—for many, it was their first job—and eventually two great games would launch. As for me? Failure—especially public failure—brings with it a few gifts. The first of these is resilience. Though this period of my life was exceedingly difficult, it taught me that I can get through anything (and that my friendship and recurring partnership with Tom Hall is bulletproof). It’s also shown me the incredible power of humility. You are only as good as your last game, no matter who you are. This was a lesson I needed to learn.
In August, I separated from Beth. Our house was large, and we had a baby, so I moved into my home office. We tried counseling a few times, and both of us thought we worked better apart than together. Five months later, once we had things sorted and stabilized, I moved out, and did right by Beth and our daughter. I supported and cared for both, and today, Lilia lives a few blocks from me here in Ireland.
The same month we separated, a report that I was murdered, by a headshot no less, spread like wildfire on the internet. Stories were everywhere: “Romero Buys the Farm” was one of many headlines. I had done a photoshoot for Texas Monthly’s “Top Twenty Texans” issue, and the resulting photograph was obviously convincing. Because of the genre of games I’d made, the photographer thought a picture of me as a corpse on a steel table in a morgue would be perfect. A makeup artist even added a gunshot wound. Somehow, that photo found its way online. I was at work late at night when the news came in, and it was scary to see the reaction from the internet. Some people thought it was just a publicity stunt and were pissed. Others were truly afraid that I’d been shot in the head and killed. I am sure that more than a few jokes were also made, but because the picture was so realistic, the concern was genuine. I found out when a reporter called the office to ask us for a statement.
“I’m not dead,” I assured him.
“You only wish you were,” Tom said later.
Those who hadn’t yet published articles on my death adjusted their headlines and stories, and they appeared regularly throughout the end of 1998.
With team members shifting around between the projects—and me still very much alive—things were starting to move forward on Daikatana. A new lead programmer joined the team, and he jumped straight in, getting both weapons and enemies working. He had expertise in AI, and it gave everyone on the team a lift. We knew we wouldn’t ship this year, particularly with the move to the Quake II engine, but things were progressing. We gave out bonuses to thank people for staying the course and to give a bit of a morale boost to the teams who had, by now, weathered a bad launch, a project cancellation, and upheaval at the senior level, not to mention the shitshower of bad press. Despite our repeated earlier talks, our failure to take action on previous team concerns meant we continued to receive complaints about Todd here and there.*
To let Warren run his office without interference, I visited only occasionally. I didn’t want him to feel like we needed to watch his every move, but each time I went down to Austin he was always able to show off some great-looking graphics and fun and interesting gameplay. Deus Ex was turning out to be something special. I was particularly impressed with Harvey Smith. Harvey had the ability to really see a story through gameplay and craft the narrative and game design in such a way that players felt fully immersed in the game’s world. Back at home base, Anachronox was also looking impressive. Tom had a complex camera system built for his writing team to create elaborate cinematics, and they were truly some of the best I had seen in real time in a PC game. Things seemed to be stabilizing for us, but that stability was really just my own blind optimism.
On November 20, 1998, eight people on my team received an email from Mike Wilson. It read: “The monkey has landed.” Mike had just cashed the check Todd had sent him to settle his partnership taxes from Ion Storm. The email was the sign the group had been waiting for. They called me into a meeting in the main conference room. All eight were gathered around the table. One acted as spokesperson. He told me that they couldn’t continue working under the current conditions with Todd and Jerry in their positions, and that they were leaving that day to form Third Law Interactive and would be working with Mike Wilson at Gathering of Developers (GodGames). They left once they delivered the news.
It was a lot to take in. I was genuinely sad to lose such a decent group of people with whom I’d worked for a while. I was pissed at and disappointed in myself. They had spoken up time and time again, so it’s not like I could say I didn’t see it coming. They gave me a chance, and I hadn’t done what needed doing because I just didn’t see a way around it. Doing nothing, however, was clearly the wrong answer. Mike gave them the opportunity to get out, and they took it. What Mike did, what they did, was just good, common sense.
I was resolved to rebuild the team, assess the game, and figure out how to go forward. It was horrible news, and I hoped that maybe this unintended changing of the guard might allow me to bring in some fresh, senior people to accelerate development. I started hiring coders and designers right away and began a full product assessment. I played through every level in production from beginning to end, the finished ones and the in-progress ones, and assessed their gameflow and construction. Many needed to be reworked. I stayed late revising episode one maps for weeks. I had to take some gigantic levels and cut them into pieces or just make them far smaller. I promoted Andrew Welch from the original Dominion team to be my lead programmer, by now the third one. He was level-headed and professional. He was the best lead programmer we had yet on the team.
On December 10, it was DOOM’s fifth birthday, and a celebration dinner was held at a restaurant in Addison with Jay Wilbur, Shawn Green, Tom Hall, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, American McGee, Sandy Petersen, Dave Taylor, John Cash, and me all in attendance. After all Ion Storm had been through those last few months, it was nice to have a bunch of laughs with old friends. We had a great time. There was no animosity, and we got along well.
In January, I hired Chris Klie to be lead level designer. Chris had most recently worked on LucasArts’s Outlaws and was a well-respected DOOM community level designer. He and I worked together to reassess the existing levels beyond episode one, both the new ones made in the Quake II engine and the older ones that had been brought over from Quake. Digging into the levels, we came to the realization that, as in episode one, several of them needed to be remade due to poor technical construction. So much time and work had been put into them. Although they played well (I had liked them when I did reviews with the previous level designers), but once Chris and I looked under the hood, they were built in a suboptimal way that choked the map-processing tools. What should have been a one-hour process took all day. Having Chris Klie was really helpful for identifying the issues and setting us on a path to fixing them.
At Chris’s recommendation, I hired Stephen Ash from LucasArts to be my new lead programmer, the fourth one, after the third one left. Stephen turned out to be far and away the best programming hire we made. Volumetric fog was added to the engine, and the levels started to look better due to Chris and Stephen’s work.
The new team finished moving the game completely over to the new Quake II engine, and on March 12, we released a multiplayer-only demo of Daikatana. We felt great about it. The players really liked the movement, air control, weapons, and levels. But even more than that, after the trials we faced over the last year, we felt like the Blues Brothers when they finally arrived at Daly Plaza—their car may have fallen to bits, but they got there.
* To his credit, in the same article, Carmack predicted we would never make our shipping window, and he was right.
* I was not at the meeting, and so trust this retelling.
* The press release can be viewed on the Blue’s News archives: bluesnews.com/archives/dec97-1.html
* Most flagship offices today also have a theater for employee meetings and for screening builds and game cinematics, a gym, and motion-capture spaces. If anything, Ion Storm’s office was only missing a full canteen and a gallery. We certainly didn’t expect it to be as amazing as it was, and we felt amazed that Eidos had kitted it out as much as they had.
* Human Head went on to do many great games, including Prey and Rune. In 2019, Human Head closed its doors and reopened with the same team and Roundhouse Studios.
* Bob Wright disputed this version of events in a January 14, 1999, article in the Dallas Observer: “On the morning of May 13, Jonathan Wright, the programmer responsible for the artificial intelligence in Daikatana—making the computer characters smart—invited Bob Wright to lunch with eight other employees, mostly Daikatana team members. According to seven of the 10 who were at lunch, the Daikatana team was seriously disenchanted. (Two did not respond to requests for interviews, and one, Shawn Green, supports [Todd] Porter’s version.) They wanted some changes, or they were ready to leave. ‘I told them to be very concrete and to present their problems in writing to their supervisors,’ recalls Bob Wright. ‘I didn’t think any more about it. On Friday, Porter comes in and confronts me, and goes off on how I’ve supposedly incited a riot … On Monday, when I came in, rumors were circulating that I was gone.’ In the same article, Porter said, ‘We fired our COO,’ insists Porter. ‘We fired him because he’d gone to [the Daikatana team] and told them that he could start another company with them.’”
* As Masters of Doom describes it, apparently Todd thought I “was too nonconfrontational” which is fair, and “despite knowing that his own aggressive style could alienate those around him, [Todd] felt obliged to get the Daikatana team back into shape.”