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In late 1998 Ion Storm would welcome its third lead programmer on Daikatana, Andrew Welch, who had previously worked on Dominion. (The first lead programmer Kimbrell left in mid-1998, and the second lead programmer, Jonathan Wright, left with the Ion Eight). A number of employees who had previously worked on Dominion would begin work on Daikatana simply because they were available after Dominion shipped, and Romero was in dire need of talent. With parts of the Dominion team on the project, "Todd [Porter] became more involved," according to Romero.
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The level editor used for Daikatana. |
No matter which programmers were working on it, the Daikatana code was starting to look like the message in a game of broken telephone that was passed around the circle a few too many times. "With so many lead programmers all putting their touch on the engine, you eventually have something that doesn't even resemble the Quake 2 engine," says Hoerner. Level designers hired for the project thought they were familiar with Quake editors, only to find out that the common commands and tools (called "entities") for levels wouldn't work in Daikatana because the code had been changed so many times. "Someone would quit," explains Shawn Green, the only employee who survived the whole Daikatana project with Romero, "and then the next coder would come in, look at the old code and get discouraged and then quit. It was a cycle."
Other cycles were also perpetuating, including the lack of community inside the office building. Todd Porter told GameSpot in November of 1998, "Ion is a work in progress. I think we grow better each day - and closer to what we wanted to create." But by the end of 1998 it appeared to outsiders that Ion wasn't growing closer to the development utopia Romero envisioned, but rather it was going in the exact opposite direction. Worst of all, Eidos Interactive had contributed close to $25 million to the company, and now Daikatana, which was once the company's surefire blockbuster, was now a game that was in dire need of retooling if it was to deliver on Romero's original promises.
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John Romero shows Stevie Case something on his computer. |
In the midst of all this, Stevie "Killcreek" Case would move on to the project as a level designer. Case, the now-famous Quake player who beat Romero in a best-of-three Quake tournament in January of 1997, had previously worked in Ion's QA department. (She had prior experience building levels for a Quake add-on pack that was scheduled for release through WizardWorks.) After promoting Case, Romero put feelers out around the industry to find individuals who would be willing to help him make Daikatana the game he wanted it to be.
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