E3 kicked off in May 1999, a month earlier than normal. We were prepared to show off the latest work on Daikatana at the huge Eidos booth that featured all their upcoming games and recent releases. As always, E3 was a spectacle of sound, light, and just pure, endless energy. David Bowie even performed at the Eidos party! Members of the press and those in the trade looked forward to seeing what was on offer, and as game developers, we were eager to see what the competition was up to. Our section of the booth included a giant statue of Hiro Miyamoto, and computers were set up so we could give press attendees a chance to play the latest build. The game looked and played okay, but it wasn’t a standout. The further we got from Quake II’s release, nearly eighteen months earlier, the older it looked. Still, we were making progress and moving forward, which, all things considered, was a minor miracle. We told the press to expect the game in January.
Deus Ex looked great, and several environments were shown off along with gameplay that included the various ways players could identify interactive objects and open hatches, crowbar crates, and use computers. There was a lot going on in their E3 demo, and the press was duly impressed by it. Warren was doing plenty of interviews extolling the features of his game and emphasizing that the team wanted the player to be able to decide how they approached the game’s challenges: total action or quiet stealth.
Anachronox’s awesome in-game cinematic camera was shown off as well, with shots swooping through several of Tom’s worlds accompanied by detective-movie-style saxophone music in the background. Players got an idea of the scale of the game from this E3 demo, and people loved the Final Fantasy-style fighting system.
Daikatana’s latest build was showing fine, and the press were excited to get some time with it. On the second day of the show, we received a new build of the game via FedEx. I’d been expecting it—the level designers wanted to add more action in the environments, and we really wanted to make as great a showing as possible. We’d reviewed their plans level by level before I left for California. Excited to get a look at it, we immediately began installation and fired it up. My excitement turned to confusion and then anger.
“What the fuck is going on?” I said to the computer. The game was chugging, practically skipping as I tried to move forward. “What the fuck is going on? What the fuck happened?” I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. We had made our plans so carefully. Why was the game fucking crawling? What changed? I was so upset I don’t even remember who I asked to reinstall the stable version of the build.
I called Chris Klie, the lead level designer. I trusted Chris implicitly. He was exceptional and detail-oriented, and he knew how important this show was for us. Both he and Stephen Ash, Daikatana’s fourth lead programmer, had worked their asses off to deliver a stable build for the show. As it turned out, once I got Chris on the phone, I realized that he was fuming, too. Apparently, Todd had presented him with a list of changes to be included with the E3 update build.
“What the fuck?” I said. I didn’t want Todd anywhere near my game, and I’d certainly provided him no such direction. To make matters even worse, once Chris made the changes he thought I requested, Todd took the CD to FedEx before the VIS process on the levels was completed. That more than explained why the maps were running slow: Without VIS, the game was trying to draw the entire map every frame.
Chris Klie was so pissed that he ended up going to John Kavanagh, vice president of development at Eidos, who by then had been installed in our office to keep an eye on things, to complain about Todd’s meddling.
For me, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back in half. When I got back to Dallas, I wasted no time going straight to John Kavanaugh myself. Granted, it should have happened sooner—the eight people who left to form Third Law Interactive made that more than clear—but I was officially done with Todd.
I laid out the problems, starting with our most recent issue, the E3 build, then put the long litany of complaints out there on the table, things I had experienced myself as well as those which had been relayed to me from people who were still at Ion and those who had left. It was all uncalled for, and this moment was long, long overdue. I explained that we had tried everything we could think of short of this measure, and that nothing had worked. There was no other choice: Todd needed to leave Ion Storm.
Seeing the writing on the wall, John arranged a meeting with Charles Cornwall, the owner of Eidos, at the Four Seasons Hotel in LA the following month. Until that time, we kept plans for the meeting under wraps.
In June, Todd, Jerry, Tom, and I flew to LA, took cabs to the Four Seasons, and got ourselves set up in the conference room for the big meeting with Eidos. Todd started to talk about the buyout he believed Eidos called us there to discuss. Charles Cornwall took a deep breath, and let Todd know point-blank that a deal was not in the cards. “We’re here because we’re concerned about Ion Storm’s leadership,” he said.
I started talking. “I’m trying to make a game, Tom is trying to make a game, and it’s been nothing but problems.” While it wasn’t the most professional way to put it, I added, “Either Todd goes, or I go. There’s always some kind of bullshit going on. Screwing up our E3 showing is just the latest.”
I went on to discuss the changes that Todd asked Chris to make.
Tom talked about how people in the company perceived him. It was his opinion that Todd wasn’t well liked and had treated people poorly. Jerry, suggesting some kind of amicable arrangement, wondered if we could perhaps give Todd his own project to work on.
Charles looked toward Tom and me and, as I remember it, said, “The only reason I invested in Ion Storm is because of John. I do not know who Todd Porter is, and I do not care.”
I don’t recall Todd addressing our issues. Rather, I recall that he collected his thoughts and calmly indicated that it was going to cost us some money.
Charles didn’t acknowledge the money comment. Instead, he told him not to bother returning to the Ion Storm office once we were back in Dallas. It was decided that both he and Jerry would leave.
With that, it was finished. I’d never felt so light in my life. I knew it wasn’t the end of the road with him, but at least the hardest part was over. I felt for Jerry, but we didn’t see any other way.
We returned from LA and informed the team that Todd and Jerry were gone. It seemed as if people were surprised and relieved. It felt like a weight had been lifted. Outside the company, it only fanned the flames of Ion Storm’s Titanic-like storyline. Behind the scenes, Todd was negotiating the financial terms of his departure. As a shareholder in the company, he had to be paid to relinquish those shares. By July, however, Todd hadn’t been paid yet and started saying he’d come back into the office. We took his message to mean, “The sooner I’m paid, the sooner I’m gone and won’t cause any problems.”
Recruiters had started circling the company looking for talent, and knowing that Daikatana wasn’t going to be the career boost their résumés were looking for, I lost both Chris Klie and Stephen Ash. I didn’t begrudge them. I’d never been on a more challenging project myself. I promoted Shawn Green, who by now had been programming in the engine since 1997, to be my fifth lead programmer, which may be an industry record. Having seen everything at id Software, he had excellent discipline, and his experience in the engine made his progress smooth. Daikatana was coming together, and though it wasn’t the game I’d hoped it would be and was certainly not the game that was hyped, it was a miracle that it was in playable shape, considering everything it had been through. Putting out one fire after another, I wasn’t able to spend enough time on it, but with the leadership changes made, everyone agreed that things were so much better.
In September, Eidos bought a majority stake of the company in exchange for development costs paid to that point and the cost of buying out Todd and Jerry (the amounts they were paid are confidential, of course, but they were substantial payments). Of us four owners, they were the only two that saw any money from Eidos. We were just grateful to have peace, and I am sure they were grateful to receive those checks.
As the year came to a close, we kept our heads down and kept working on Daikatana, Anachronox, and Deus Ex. Things were productive and sometimes stressful. We were working a lot of hours, and the firestorm in the media and on forums had only heated up. Heading into December, we knew we weren’t going to make the January launch of Daikatana, but we held the “not launch” party anyway in the Rotunda of the Chase Tower, since Eidos had planned it for months and too many people’s calendars were scheduled around it. The party was a big affair, and around one hundred people came. It was the first chance we’d had to celebrate in our entire existence as a company.
For the first half of 2000, the Daikatana team put their heads down to get the game ready to go out the door. In March, it hit beta (all the content was in), and we furiously fixed all the bugs we could find. Through April, we tested the game over and over for weeks. Every four days, we made a new build, and a new release candidate. Inevitably, we’d find another bug, usually a serious one. We worked and worked to fix that, too. By mid-May, we were at Release Candidate 18. It was not the game we hoped it might be, but we had run out of time. Eidos deemed it good enough to launch.
On May 22, Daikatana appeared in stores in the US. Those who believed the hype were heartily disappointed when it didn’t live up to it. Those who did not believe the hype took pleasure in pointing out just how hard it had failed. One reviewer even said I should be punched in the face for it—in print no less. Not surprisingly, it got mostly negative reviews, with many knocking it for its poor sidekick AI (which dramatically affected play), a host of remaining bugs, and its dated look. By now, Quake III had been out for five months. I also decided to make the first level super challenging, but players didn’t like that either, something that would surely be revealed in today’s focus test-driven development. Reviewers had expected a game better than Quake, and it was certainly not. (Today, the unofficial community patches have addressed the core issues of the game, and its gameplay is closer to what it should have been at launch. It even has a following and active community.)
In contrast to Daikatana, Deus Ex released June 23, 2000, to amazing reviews. We were thrilled for the team, and I was grateful that Warren got the chance to make it and make it at Ion Storm. Deus Ex went on to win several well-deserved Game of the Year awards. As of May 2022, series sales for Deus Ex have reached twelve million units. It was a breakaway success story where everything went right, and Eidos easily earned out its investment in Ion Storm on Deus Ex sales alone. Some did criticize Deus Ex for dated graphics, but I feel that this was not uncommon in this era of the graphics arms race, where sometimes graphics took precedence over gameplay. The team took a break after shipping it and returned to work on a patch to fix the noted issues. Once that was done, they began preproduction on the next game in the series.
After a break, I started to work on my next FPS, then titled, simply, Game X. I worked with the art team and created some environmental concepts so that we could visualize the world, and we began to experiment with a new program, Bryce 4, a terrain generator that created fractal landscapes. For Game X, we installed and were getting familiar with Unreal Engine. It was different than Quake’s engine, obviously, but exceptionally powerful and being used by a number of developers to make FPS games. The main character used a first- to third-person camera that transitioned smoothly between those modes. To my knowledge, it was the first FPS to do this, although the game was never released.
The Anachronox team buckled down, and we worked together to both determine and solidify only the maps with which Anachronox would launch. In September, the team started to work longer hours, under pressure to get the game out the door. Eidos asked me and my Game X team to join forces with the Anachronox developers. The levels needed some help, and I took control of the game location and map compilation tasks and also aided in scripting everything that wasn’t done yet, for which Tom was grateful. After the Daikatana and Deus Ex launches, we really wanted Anachronox to be closer to the Deus Ex end of the spectrum, so we did whatever we could to ensure that everything Tom needed was in the game.
Anachronox hit retail shelves on June 27, 2001, and, fortunately, it was well received, garnering positive reviews from critics and even a “Best Use of Humor” award from Computer Gaming World. Unfortunately, Eidos barely supported it through advertising, and most players came to it via word of mouth or reviews. Development had taken a full year longer than Daikatana, and in order to recoup some of their investment, Eidos limited its marketing spend.
A month earlier, rumors on the internet surfaced to say that Ion Storm was shutting down. I talked to Stan Herndon, our then CFO, who was in daily contact with Eidos. He’d just received the news himself and was planning to talk with me. The rumors were true: Eidos was planning to close the studio in the next few months, as soon as Anachronox shipped. It was not unexpected, but it was certainly tough news. Of paramount importance to me was making sure that the team knew right away so they could prepare for their futures. I wanted to plan a shutdown, and not have them stuck in an instantaneous scramble. I negotiated with Eidos to give us a month after Anachronox shipped so our people would have time to get new jobs. To their credit, Eidos agreed, and to the team’s credit, everyone stayed until the end.
July 31, 2001, was our last day at Ion Storm. Tom and I rolled carts of our stuff from the office into the parking lot and loaded up the trunks of our cars.
“See you tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll see you then.”
Daikatana and Ion Storm are cautionary tales of a game that still somehow made it out the door and of a company that could not survive its many challenges. People have asked me for years what went wrong. The answer, in a literal word, is me. If nothing else, writing this book has been a transformative process. It has allowed me to see patterns that have followed and defined me, patterns I may not otherwise have seen. As a child, when things got bad, out of necessity, I stayed quiet and waited for it to pass. When Carmack sent out his report card, I stayed quiet and waited for it to pass. When people were upset at things happening within Ion Storm, I stayed quiet and waited for it to pass. Everything that happened at Ion Storm is a direct result of that flaw in my character. Had I taken action, had I talked to people, had I prevented issues from developing when they were just emerging, so many things in my career and in my life would have been different and so many people would have been spared the difficulties this flaw created.
In particular, at Ion Storm, I should have taken action regarding the team’s issues with people in positions of leadership when people first asked me to, instead of letting it go on. In the end, that caused the teams a lot of stress and cost me a lot of time away from Daikatana. Both paid the price. I also never should have approved the notorious Bitch ad or allowed the hype train to leave the station.
While comparing notes, Tom and I reflected on a lot of difficult moments at Ion Storm, but we shared a lot of beautiful ones, too. To this day, the Anachronox team still meets up for dinner every year at the Game Developers Conference. They’re close. Deus Ex is regularly named “Game of the Decade” and always appears on “greatest games of all time” lists. I remain good friends with most everyone who was at Ion Storm, people who are still changing the industry through their visionary work even today. And it bears repeating that many people got their start at Ion Storm. I think Henrik Jonsson, former programmer on Anachronax who is currently an investment scout for the game industry, put it best: “The young people who got together at Ion Storm learned massive amounts about game development, and went on to do great things: I doubt that Epic Games would be the same if not for people like Lee Perry, Jay Hosfeldt, Chris Perna, and Josh Jay, who grew into their own at Ion Storm. Gears of War and Fortnite would be very, very different, or even not exist, if it weren’t for some Ion Storm people. You liked the writing in God of War? Matt Sophos and Richie Gaubert, the writers of GoW, both grew up at Ion Storm. Joey Liaw, who saved Healthcare 2.0 “Obama-care” website? Ion Storm programmer. The list goes on. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Ion Storm as a breeding ground for exceptional talent.” Not surprisingly, Jerry O’Flaherty, who even then showed a lot of talent in spite of everything happening around him, went on to become the Art Director at Epic Games.
While I wish it had not been as rocky as it was, I am grateful to everyone who was there, however briefly, and to those who stuck with it as long as they did. I’m also grateful to the fans who send me emails, sometimes apologetically, like they’re admitting to a crime, “I actually liked Daikatana.” I am sure they also like it more now that fan-made patches fixed the AI and other issues. I’m grateful for the lessons I learned, including the hard ones. If I had to sum it all up as a business lesson, this is it:
Don’t let problems magnify; deal with issues as soon as they arise. Problems always magnify over time.
Don’t hype what you don’t have.
Never insult your fans, even in jest.
Trust your gut instinct. If you think something is wrong, there’s probably a reason, even if it’s not obvious. (Though in the case of the Bitch ad, it was obvious).
Make sure people are treated well; games do not make themselves.
Focus on the fun; games do not design themselves.
Surround yourself with good people and give them what they need to make something great.
Find a way to support someone, like a video game publisher, who wants to make something else great, even if that something else is without you.
Vet your founders because you will face highs, lows, and challenges together.
Fail gracefully. Failure is a part of games, a part of life, and a part of success. Accept your flaws, reload your save and try again.