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An image from the Dark Ages level that was displayed at E3 1997. |
Daikatana made its public debut at the Eidos E3 booth in Atlanta on a humid Thursday morning in June of 1997. Daikatana was put front and center in the booth as one of Eidos' blockbuster games for the holidays, right alongside the sequel to Tomb Raider. The Daikatana team had assembled a demo for E3 that included a Dark Ages level, complete with falling snow and snow-capped cottages.
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Click to download the E3 1997 promotional movie for Daikatana (Quicktime format) |
Most in the industry were left unimpressed by the demo, in part because none of the monsters was working, but more importantly because Daikatana was still running in software mode, meaning it wasn't 3D accelerated. Other games at the show, notably id's Quake II, employed 3D acceleration to up the visual ante with colored lighting and millions of colors onscreen at the same time. In contrast, Daikatana looked dated next to its competitors. Romero's interest in focusing on content meant that Daikatana's technology was quickly falling behind the curve of what Carmack was doing at id. Everyone was wondering who would be the first to release a new game - Romero or Carmack - and when Romero saw his old partner dazzling E3 crowds with jaw-dropping visuals and monsters that could duck under bullets, he panicked.
- Mike Wilson to TIME Magazine
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"As soon as I saw Quake II [at E3], I said to myself, 'Forget it, I'm not putting out the game this year,'" says Romero. The colored lighting and 3D acceleration just made too much of a visual difference in Romero's estimation. Mike Wilson had told TIME magazine a few weeks before, "3D is like Technicolor... once you're there, you're there," but now Romero was beginning to realize that he missed the technological toys Carmack was fashioning at id. While the idea was to solely focus on the content and design at Ion Storm, the quantum leap in 3D technology was irresistible to Romero, especially since Ion Storm had the rights to the Quake II source code as specified in Ion's original agreement with id. Now the Technicolor analogy didn't work - it wasn't just 3D geometry that mattered, but rather 3D acceleration, and Romero refused to let Daikatana ship without support for 3D cards.
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Quake 2's 3D acceleration and colored lighting was too great a temptation for Romero to stay with Quake 1 technology. |
Faced with a lackluster E3 debut, Romero told the online magazine GamesMania in July of 1997, "What everyone saw at E3 was pretty much 2 percent of the final product, so any misconceptions will be cleared up upon final release." In the meantime, the company would move from the Quadrangle office building to the 30th floor of the Chase Tower, 24 floors below where the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory of gaming was being built out.
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Treats sit on a desk at Ion Storm, the place Wired called an "amusement park." |
Even on the 30th floor, a total shantytown with network cables and makeshift desks, production on Daikatana kept moving ahead with a team that approached 20 members. Wired magazine visited in late 1997 and commented "Working at Ion Storm isn't a job, it's a daily visit to an amusement park." Little did Wired know that the amusement park analogy would work all too well in 1998 as the company began a roller coaster of a year. It would be a year that would culminate in a large part of Romero's team walking out the door.
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