GameSpot Presents: Geoff Keighly: Behind the Game Knee Deep in a Dream ~ The Story of Daikatana Written by: Geoff Keighley Designed by: James Cheung Presented by: GameSpot.com, circa 2000. URL: http://www.gamespot.com/features/btg-daikatana/ Selected Photography by: Ric Moore Table of Contents: Part 1: Dream Design -A New Romero? -From Comics to Cyberdemons -Id-entity Crisis Part 2: Building the Anti-id -Development Utopia -Moving the Genre Forward -No Excuses Tour -We Got Depth -Content is King Part 3: Patently Ludicrous -Go Play Diablo -The Seven-Month Game -The Bitch Arrives -Behind the Curve Part 4: The 1300 Pixel Arrow -Decaying Morale -Cart Before the Horse -The Glass Bubble -Waning Focus -The Dude Cares Part 5: I Heard a Rumor -The Ion Eight -Fractured Vision Part 6: Work in Progress -Hell or High Water -Long Road Ahead -12 Frames Ain't Enough -Lack of Discipline -Late vs. Crap -Stick a Fork in It Part 7: In Quest of Gold -Done! -It's All About the Game -The Second Coming? -Creativity Endures Part 1: Dream Design It's just past midnight on a windy February evening in Dallas, Texas, and game designer John Romero sits in his office, scrolling through e-mail. The glow of his 21-inch monitor illuminates his face, while the glass of a framed photo on the desk behind him - which depicts Romero with former partner John Carmack of id in front of a red Ferrari - reflects the monitor's image. Romero keeps scrolling at a breakneck pace, as if his inbox is its own deathmatch where dealing with each e-mail translates into one more frag in his column. As he reads, Romero shoots off replies, complete with his e-mail signature that proclaims, "Daikatana: Almost Done!" above an ASCII-text representation of a Hummer vehicle. But tonight one message stands out from the rest. Romero's reply tempo is upset when he begins to read a message from a game fan who seemingly picked up Romero's e-mail address off an online site. "Make a public statement that Daikatana is really a thought and some screenshots," the pithy e-mail begins. Then it gets more personal. "I'm here to tell you: Your days as a game developer are absolutely over." Each word of the author's prose further accentuates the prevailing theme that is stated in the concluding paragraph: "I think it would be impossible for you to sleep at night, knowing that you milk the industry and blanket yourself under the sheets of pity." After Romero's eyes zero in on the words "sheets of pity," he swivels his chair away from the screen. While not articulating it, it's clear the e-mail vitriol fazed him. "I get that kind of mail on a daily basis," he attests, trying to brush it off. But you can tell no matter how dispassionate he tries to be, each e-mail acts as salt to his wounds, wounds that have grown deeper and wider throughout the development of Daikatana, a first-person shooter that is the first full-scale production from infamous Dallas-based developer Ion Storm. Yet before you pull out your violin to help paint the somber portrait of Romero being a game designer misunderstood by his fans, you remember the ads that ran three years ago, the ones that screamed, "John Romero Wants To Make You His Bitch!" Back then Daikatana was billed as the glorious follow-up to Quake that was going to be done in seven months. Now, it's a game that is more than two years late, has gone through five lead programmers, and is produced by a company that has reportedly burned through $30 million in a few short years. For a second you think that maybe the e-mail author was right - who is Romero, the legendary designer of games like Doom and Quake, trying to fool? Part 1: A New Romero? But then you look around his office and see dozens of game boxes, Japanese game soundtracks neatly categorized into folders, and piles of computer gaming magazines strewn across his desk. There's even a big Cyberdemon poster from the Doom days in the back corner. Romero's office is a gamer's tree house. Ultimately, it dawns on you: This guy loves games. Four years ago, he had a dream, a dream to build a playground where he could flex his creative muscles without restriction. We all like to think that once we become successful we'll get to call the shots and answer to no one, building our own utopia brick by brick. Romero is one to dream. As Jay Wilbur, the former president of id Software, told the Dallas Morning News in 1996, "There's certainly an attitude that John exudes: 'I've got a dream, I'm going to do it. Don't get in my way.'" Romero thought his dream would be realized when he founded Ion Storm. But sometimes the path to realizing a fantasy can be long and winding, filled with friends, foes, and fallacies. Now, the first major test of how well Romero's vision can turn into reality is Daikatana, a time-twisting romp through 4,485 years of human history, where a metallic talisman of sorts, the Daikatana (meaning "big sword" in Japanese), helps you clear the deck of foes and warp from the tope-confines of Ancient Greece straight to the passages of Alcatraz in 21st century San Francisco. It's a wild ride through disparate environments, but in many ways it's not unlike the ride that Ion Storm has been on for the past three years. Try as it might, the company has worked tirelessly to churn out Romero's long-awaited game. It's a game that has been the subject of unprecedented coverage in the PC gaming industry - and most of it not very positive coverage at that. "I wish the game came out sooner," Romero says, admitting the obvious as he sits in his office, long black locks back in a ponytail, dressed in gray Versace slacks. But then he deepens his explanation with a sentiment that is as anti-Make-You-His-Bitch as they come: "But the fact is that things were pretty bad here." Could it be a hint of candor? You begin to wonder if this is a new John Romero or just the one that's always been there, stripped of the usual "he's a rock star" PR spin. No matter the spin, one thing's clear: The story of Daikatana is a tale of one man's dream and how that dream can sometimes take a team on a journey to places it might never imagine. But through thick and thin, John Romero has produced a game he feels embodies his design ethos. Getting there wasn't easy. Part 1: From Comics to Cyberdemons Most gamers inextricably link the name John Romero to id Software, the Texas development house where Romero worked for nearly a decade on games that helped invent the first-person-shooter action genre, such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. But few know the Romero who started programming on computers at the age of seven, the kid who during class would write down code on paper, only to rush home after the bell had rung to type it into his computer. John Romero moved around a lot as a kid - his parents divorced when he was in elementary school - and his high school years were spent at Alconbury High, located on an Air Force base in England. While Romero's 1.36 GPA in high school wasn't anything to be proud of, he found solace by drawing pencil comics of a blond crew-cut kid named Melvin, who was always in trouble. The comics were, in many ways, his way to artistically express himself - a creative outlet. Years later, Romero would translate his creative energies into building gameworlds on a computer. At SoftDisk, the Shreveport, Louisiana, developer where he met John Carmack, Adrian Carmack (no relation), and Tom Hall, Romero was so poor that he couldn't afford a personal computer, so he'd haul his office computer home on the weekends so he could keep working. Eventually Romero would forge a bond with these other SoftDisk employees and go on to create the leanest and most respected game developer of the 1990s: Mesquite, Texas-based id Software. In time Romero would have ample resources to buy as many computers as he wanted, along with a 1991 Ferrari. The shareware game Wolfenstein 3D was id's first major success and was soon followed by the id masterpiece Doom, which still stands as arguably the perfect balance between technology and design. Doom was a game that thrust Romero and Carmack into the spotlight and helped create the "egos at id" image played up in a famous Wired cover story. Soon after Doom - and its sequel Doom II - would come Quake, a title that would indirectly give birth to the idea of Daikatana... and sever the relationship between Romero and id. Part 1: Id-entity Crisis The battle between design (Romero) and technology (Carmack) at id had been a healthy tension up until Quake, but by the time the game was midway into production in 1995, it was becoming clear that Romero felt his creativity and design were second fiddle to getting the game done. "Before Quake," explains Romero, "everyone at id knew exactly the game we were going to make. But once you start getting too many people, they cloud the vision, and it caused a lot of confusion. The project was taking too long and people just wanted to fall back on the formula and not try the cool new thing." During Quake's development Romero did find a way to push design in new ways, especially by working with outside developer Raven on Heretic and Hexen. "That was basically in response to not being able to build the games I wanted to within id," he says. However, Romero's yearning for bigger, grander design would eventually butt heads with the rest of id during the final stretch of development on Quake. In late 1995 Romero came up with an idea to solve the problems: splitting the company into two divisions - one for design, the other for technology. Romero was so frustrated he confronted id co-owners Kevin Cloud and Adrian Carmack in November of 1995: "I told Kevin and Adrian, point blank, 'Guys, if this does...
RetroMancjA