We all made John Romero our bitch
We all remember the infamous line John Romero is about to make you his bitch in the Daikatana ads. And us, naive, puerile, infantile gamers, seduced by the gold and the gore of Doom and Quake, wanted SO BAD to be a part of the massive bitch-turning madness knowing Romero’s credentials.
The story of how Daikatana came to existence has been already covered in the media. Maybe the subject matter has been overanalyzed. But there’s something about this game I can’t get out of my freaking head. It was supposed to be an exciting, innovative adventure that turned into one of the biggest flops in video gaming history.
Still to this day, this title poses some serious questions I haven’t been able to answer after all these years, no matter how many articles on the topic I read. Maybe through this article I will, or maybe not. Maybe the joke is not on Romero or the company he cofounded after leaving id Software, but on us. Buckle up, for we are about to start a bumpy ride.
A victim of overhype and expectations
I guess it’s difficult to live up to your own reputation when you become some sort of “gaming rockstar”, as Daikatana developers Matthew Cox and Zach Baker once defined the personnel that worked on Ion Storm’s offices. And rightfully so. John Romero was indeed a rockstar of his own.
The guy was behind the iconic designs of milestone games for the PC industry such as Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Then he had a falling out with lead Id Software programmer, John Carmack. Carmack wanted to focus more on the engine and couldn’t care less about the story (which is why Quake III Arena is a multiplayer only experience, by the way). As long as the game worked, the mechanics worked and the engine ran well, it was good for him.
Romero, on the other hand, wanted to give more than action and functional engines or mechanics. He wanted to tell stories, navigate players through plots, and try to blend the character and the player himself into one single entity. All of this is told in the documentary The History of id Software, which can be found on YouTube and can be seen right here:
The rest is history. John Romero leaves, co-founds Ion Storm and announces he is working in a new game. The mind behind the level design of Doom and Quake was working on a creation of his own, and had a plot that excited gamers’ imagination far and wide the planet.
We were promised a huge, epic game consistent on time traveling with an intelligent sidekick. Everything would be designed to embark us on a long journey that would immerse us in a dramatic, compelling story. I’ve summed it in a quite simplistic way, but if you get to read it as Romero wrote it, it would sound enticing and really cool even today.
Certainly, Daikatana was ambitious, even by today’s standards. It didn’t help that Time Magazine overhyped the game back in 1997, saying that the sidekick companion was a “bold departure” from what we had seen in the industry until then, amongst other things.
But let’s focus. It wasn’t only the game that was overhyped. John Romero was a victim of his own hype. Look at it this way: if you were part responsible of the success of two of the most genre-defining FPSs of all time, and if it seemed that you could do no wrong, no matter what, what would you do? It seems romero chose to carry on with his vision of the ultimate video game at all costs, for it was what he wanted to play. We all know the rest of the story.
The bitch maker was turned into one
Daikatana is not a bad game by any accounts. It’s not that it is a good game, either. It might be more appropriate to call it an average title which was done in a rush, after multiple delays, tons of internal strife, with deadlines to accomplish and an overhyped fan base which anticipated this title like the second coming of Christ.
And what most of us got was a poorly finished product which was totally underwhelming. The developement of the title started in 1997, with an E3 technical demo in 1998, but Daikatana wouldn’t be released until 2000. Now that’s some development hell for ya. At the time this was totally unprecedented, so keep those The Last Guardian facts away from me.
As NPR published, in those days when games stuck in development hell, and at the money-burning rate of Ion Storm in 1999 of $1 million a month, you had no chance to rewrite the engine and update the technology. The visuals started to age, and with the substantial graphical evolution made from 1997 to 2000 (remember the PS2 and its, at the time, incredible graphic capability was launched on March 4, 2000), Daikatana, based on the Quake 2 Engine, was no longer cutting-edge.
The aforementioned John Romero is about to make you his bitch ad campaign didn’t help, either. It was perceived as arrogant by gamers who didn’t (and didn’t have to) know who this John Romero guy was, and their response affected the game. It was a bad marketing decision, which in 2010 resulted in him apologizing for it as Kotaku published.
Author Neil Steinberg, of Complete & Utter Failures: A Celebration of Also-Rans, Runners-Ups and Never-Weres fame, said about Daikatana’s disastrous ad campaign that “if you have arrogance, it makes the flop puff up. We love nothing more than to see the hottie brought down”. And everybody seemed to enjoy what was happening.
“We left 50 bucks on the pillow and moved on”
Technically John Romero made many, many people his bitch (as for buying a poorly executed game, that is). As I stated before, the guy was a victim of his very own hype and his own status in the industry. When his ambitious project failed the way ambitious FPSs use to do, he became the easy target.
The press that once praised him, now was ready to slam him hard. Right after the game was released, was met with poor sales, ravaging critics about how bad it was and had the gaming community against it, Daikatana fell into obscurity (only to be brought back every once in a while). Then, Ion Storm would last until it closed shop in 2005, and Romero went to develop mobile games.
Basically, when the whole world was done humiliating the man, we left 50 bucks on the pillow and moved on to something else. But we failed to see the positive things that Daikatana brought to the table, like a new way to integrate the RPG mechanics into the FPS genre.
This was something System Shock 2 did in 1999, and the original Deus Ex had its own way to implement these elements as well. Hadn’t been for these pioneers we might have never seen the likes of BioShock. Not all FPS games since SS2, Deus Ex and Daikatana use the RPG-like skill trees, but many do.
Also, the ambition to tell a great story since the very beginning was something FPSs hadn’t put much effort on. We all know what the aforementioned games did in the story department, and you can’t discount what the original Half-Life meant as for storytelling in 1998. Now everybody tries to tell a compelling story that navigates us through the bullet storms.
Yet Daikatana wasn’t the first game trying to immerse us in a story with a protagonist we could relate to, you could summarize it as a set of good (even revolutionary) ideas executed in the worst way possible. Many of its predecessors did before what Ion Storm had set to do first: Half-Life changed the time traveling with interdimensional traveling, while the original Deus Ex was one of the most perfect blends of RPG with FPS. SS2 threw some survival horror elements in the mix, and those three games have almost perfect storytelling.
Bonus: The few and the faithful
While most gamers openly don’t appreciate Daikatana as a whole, there’s another side of the story that’s constantly overlooked: the ones who enjoyed the game. They were not great in number, but they are still there. In fact, you could see a few examples of this if you check out Metacritic’s Daikatana page.
As PC Gamer pointed out, there are quite a few people who can be considered as hardcore Daikatana fans, who still play the game to this day, and who are actively trying to resurrect the whole thing. All in all, 18 years after it was launched, maybe a few lights are starting to shine through the thick shitstorm.
There is one person to blame for what, at the time PC Gamer’s article was written, was considered as Daikatana version 1.3. His name is Frank Sapone, an IT professional from Pennsylvania, who is a big part of the resurrection of the title. The 1.3 patch adds HD textures, corrects many bugs and, in many Steam users view, makes it playable at last. The patch is available at BitBucket, with a comprehensive installation guide to boot.
After Square Enix took hold of Ion Storm’s IP, the game appeared on Steam in 2013. You can buy it for less than €6, so if you dare to try the game out and install the latest community patch, you know you won’t be spending the amount of money a full-fledged AAA title demands to be played.
