John Romero is not only lazy, but was also far too full of himself. I remember seeing an ad in PC Gamer a long time ago that said something like "You're about to be John Romero's bitch" and nothing else but some logos (it was Eidos they hit up for money). Anyway, I'm going to explain it all for you guys. ION Storm's main location was in Dallas. They bought the top floor of some skyscraper and spent millions renovating the whole place, putting in the most expensive of everything and then touring the press around the place. They were touting their new slogan around, saying they were going to change the way games are made. They got lots of people in on the dream, hired like crazy, and got to work. They spent a while making a huge deal out of them selves, and by the time they sat down with publisher Eidos to make a deal, they had already made themselves out to be a star company worth something like a 100 million dollars (!). They settled with Eidos, and they got a few million for like 5 games. ION Storm decided to take the easy route. They were going to buy unfinished games, patch em up, and breeze through the first year or so. They're first one was some strategy game, I forgot the name. They showed it to the press after the tour of their facilities, and got a response so bad that it must have broken all of their hearts. But they released it anyway, without fixing it. And it sucked. Horribly. And this was when Total Annihilation and Age of Empires were doing great, and Starcraft was coming out extremely soon. In fact I downloaded the Starcraft demo like the same month I was reading the horrible reviews for their game. Anyway, Daikatana finally came out, and it was horrible. Then they released it on N64. It was still horrible. Eidos spent something like 40 million dollars on ION Storm over the years (Daikatana was delayed for like 3 years and they changed from the Quake 2 to Unreal engine halfway through). In fact, Eidos spent so much money on ION Storm that the talented Looking Glass Studios (Thief, System Shock) got screwed over. Warren Specter and his team from Looking Glass moved on over to ION Storm's little Austin division (ION Storm and Retro Studios are both in Austin by the way, and in my opinion the only thing worth noting about the boring city), where they created Deus Ex, the game that saved ION Storm's butts. Nevertheless, the Austion division was the only one that survived the disaster that was Daikatana....in fact, Warren Specter and his team didn't even refer to themselves as the same company that made Daikatana, and who could blame them. Specter and team saved ION Storm, and now they are working on Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3, building up ION Storm, and they are going to get the attention they deserve. And Romero, he was in the spotlight for a few moments, and then went from riches to rags in a matter of moments because of his ego, arrogance, and laziness. You know what he's doing know? He's got a crap job now, making cheap games for the N-Gage (well that's what my friend says, don't know where he heard it), a failure worthy of Daikatana's caliber. Romero took the easy way out, and got taken out. Now he's going to work on failure after failure, and people like Warren Specter will be the ones supplying us with great games.
Topic: Acclaim stops making games for cube. (Read 6287 times)
