Daikatana

• 1. Introduction

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  Daikatana arrived in May 2000 with the weight of years of broken promises behind it. A first-person shooter from Ion Storm, it had been announced in 1997 as the triumphant solo debut of John Romero, the man who co-created Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. Those three games had largely built the first-person shooter genre from nothing. Expectations were not merely high; they were almost mythological.

  The title itself translates roughly from Japanese kanji as "big sword," a name Romero borrowed from an item in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign played by the original members of id Software. The game's story follows a swordmaster named Hiro Miyamoto, named in honour of legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who must travel through four distinct time periods to undo a world-spanning conspiracy. Behind that story lay a development odyssey involving engine switches, mass staff resignations, a notoriously provocative magazine advertisement, and a demo that ran at a stuttering 12 frames per second at the 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo.

  By the time the game shipped, it sold only 40,351 copies in the United States through September 2000, against internal forecasts that had once projected 2.5 million units. The question worth asking is not simply why the game failed, but how a project that began with so much promise became what Computer Gaming World named the worst game of 2000.

• 2. The Ion Storm Vision

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  Ion Storm was founded by John Romero alongside Tom Hall, Bob Wright, Mike Wilson, Todd Porter, and Jerry O'Flaherty with a specific philosophy: to make games that answered to their creators' tastes rather than to publisher mandates. Both Romero and Hall had found publisher constraints stifling at id Software, and Ion Storm was meant to be the corrective.

  Eidos Interactive funded that ambition generously. The studio received a $13 million advance, and the game carried a rumoured budget of $30 million. Daikatana was the third game conceived at Ion Storm, after Anachronox and what became Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3, and it formed part of an initial three-game contract with Eidos.

  From the outset, the internal culture complicated everything. Mike Wilson, the CEO, was removed in November 1997 after using $30,000 in company funds to purchase a BMW. Bob Wright was removed by Porter and O'Flaherty in May 1998, and that single event triggered the departure of over 50 Ion Storm employees. Porter and O'Flaherty were themselves fired in 1999, with reports suggesting that Romero had grown furious at Porter's interference in Daikatana's production. The leadership turnover was relentless, and it began eroding the project before a single episode was finished.

• 3. Design Ambitions and the Engine Switch

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  Romero's design document for Daikatana ran to 400 pages. In 1997, he compared Quake's seven weapons and 10 monsters with Daikatana's planned 35 weapons and 16 monsters per episode. John Carmack, his former collaborator at id Software, stated plainly that a game of that scale could not be completed by its December 1997 release date.

  Two games influenced the design more than anything else: Chrono Trigger and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. From Chrono Trigger, Romero drew the sidekick mechanic; from Ocarina of Time, the central sword. He wanted the two sidekick characters, Mikiko Ebihara and Superfly Johnson, to do everything the player could do, including jumping, running, and solving puzzles. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon from 2001 was cited as another reference point for what the AI companions should be capable of. Romero later admitted that programming this feature proved far more difficult than anticipated, and the sidekicks became one of the most criticised elements of the final game.

  The engine decision compounded every other problem. The game was originally built on the Quake engine with a planned December 1997 release. Romero saw the Quake II demo at E3 1997 and committed to switching to the newer engine. The Quake II engine was not delivered to Ion Storm until February 1998, and the transition wiped out months of completed work. Romero later said he wished he had used the Quake II engine from the beginning; he also noted that a rivalry manufactured by Ion Storm's marketing department between themselves and id Software created additional friction in obtaining and using the technology. Quake II and then Quake III Arena both shipped before Daikatana reached stores.

• 4. Departures and Collapse

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  By 1998, the departures were becoming structural rather than incidental. Lead artist Bryan Pritchard left that year and was replaced by Eric Smith. Around twenty staff members either left Ion Storm entirely or transferred to the Austin studio. Christian Divine, who created the character Superfly Johnson, originally named Super Williams in honour of Super Fly and Jim Kelly's role in Enter the Dragon, eventually left for Ion Storm's Austin office to work on Deus Ex. Divine attributed the collapse to a combination of an overly carefree internal atmosphere and corporate ownership disputes that pulled focus away from the game.

  The most dramatic moment came when nine core team members resigned publicly at the same time. Romero later said he understood the decision given the state of morale, but experienced it as a betrayal of trust. In early 1999, seventeen people representing one-fifth of Ion Storm's workforce left the studio. Among them was Corrinne Yu, the director of technology, who departed for 3D Realms. By the same year, nearly the entire Daikatana team had moved to join Gathering of Developers. Only two staff members remained on the project for its entire production.

  The situation became serious enough that Eidos publishing director John Kavanagh was sent in to address the production problems directly. In a later interview, Romero cited the development culture, management conflicts, and the repeated loss of completed work as the principal reasons for the game's troubled state at release. Wired placed Daikatana fifth on its vaporware list for 1999.

• 5. The Notorious Advertisement

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  No single element of Daikatana's promotional campaign haunted the game more persistently than a 1997 print advertisement bearing the phrase: "John Romero's about to make you his bitch." The ad was created by the same artist who designed the game's box art, under the direction of Ion Storm's chosen advertising agency. Sasha Shor designed both the packaging and the advertisement.

  Both Mike Wilson and Romero approved it at the time, with Wilson confirming they found it funny. Romero had second thoughts quickly afterward but was persuaded by Wilson to let it stand. Speaking roughly a decade later, Romero said he had gone along with the campaign partly because he had a reputation for similar kinds of provocative phrases. He acknowledged that the reactions to the poster damaged the game's image well before it was released, and that the damage continued to affect his public image and career long afterward.

  In a 2008 blog post, Romero attributed the decision specifically to Wilson, which prompted a hostile and public exchange between the two. The broader marketing approach drew Romero into press obligations that pulled him away from development at a time when the project needed close creative oversight. Romero later reflected that Ion Storm's marketing, whatever its intentions, made the studio and its lead figures appear egotistical rather than ambitious. The Dallas Observer deepened the damage further by publishing a story on the Austin office's internal struggles, drawing on undercover interviews and leaked emails; Romero publicly called the article's claims both biased and inaccurate.

• 6. Release and Reception

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  On the 21st of April 2000, Daikatana reached gold status. It shipped the following month. Ion Storm's 1996 business plan had projected sales of around 175,000 copies; later internal forecasts climbed to 2.5 million units, a figure that GameDaily described as the threshold for the game to become profitable. The reality was stark. According to PC Data, only 8,190 copies sold in the United States by the 21st of July, generating revenues of $271,982. Mark Asher of CNET Gamecenter called that performance a disaster.

  Critics were almost uniformly negative. Jeff Lundrigan, reviewing the PC version for Next Generation, rated it two stars out of five and described it as "notable mostly for its mediocrity," placing it two years out of its time. Entertainment Weekly gave it a D, comparing the game unfavourably to the film Waterworld. PC Zone singled out the first episode as the worst section and published a line about Romero's reputation that became widely quoted. The second episode, set in ancient Greece, was the exception: Robert Coffey in Computer Gaming World praised it as the game's strongest level.

  The Nintendo 64 version received unfavourable reviews as well. Nintendo Power scored it 5.6 out of 10 and made the pointed comparison that Doom on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was superior. GameSpot's David Toole noted the low enemy count and weak music, though he credited the version's smooth in-game framerate. The Game Boy Color version, adapted at Romero's request as a top-down dungeon crawler in the style of early Zelda titles, did not receive a North American release at all; Kemco cited the Daikatana brand's poor reputation as the reason, and the version that did reach Europe and Japan was reviewed considerably more positively, with GameSpot's Frank Provo giving it a seven out of ten.

• 7. Legacy and the Unofficial Patch

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  GameTrailers ranked Daikatana second on its list of the biggest gaming disappointments of the 2000s, describing the combination of poor AI, delayed release dates, the magazine advertisement, and the internal drama as the embodiment of the game industry's capacity for hubris. The critic Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, in a retrospective episode of Zero Punctuation, placed Daikatana among the most notorious disappointments in the entire history of first-person shooters, comparing it to Duke Nukem Forever.

  Romero's own verdict in 2010 was more personal. Despite the critical consensus and the commercial failure, he said that Daikatana was "more fun to make than Quake," citing the absence of the creative interference he had experienced at id Software. The final patch for the PC version, version 1.2, was released on the 29th of September 2000. Ion Storm Austin closed the Dallas branch in July 2001, and Romero subsequently gave the game's source code to community members so they could develop ports for Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like systems.

  The community eventually went further. Modder and IT professional Frank Sapone requested the complete source code from Romero directly. The hard drive Romero sent arrived corrupted. Sapone shelved it for five years, then successfully compiled the code. In 2014, the first version of what became known as the Daikatana 1.3 patch was released, targeting the buggy AI, online multiplayer, loading times, and graphical fidelity, with support added for widescreen resolutions up to 4K and 5K. Matteo Lupetti of Eurogamer wrote that thanks to the modders, Daikatana had become a totally playable game. The project remains under active development today.