Part 7: In Quest of Gold

Shawn Green took over the lead programming duties in mid-1999.

Steve Ash's exit from Daikatana meant that the project had gone through four lead programmers in just more than three years. With the game nearing completion in the fall of 1999, Romero appointed Shawn Green as lead programmer. Green, who worked at id with Romero, has the dubious distinction of being the lone Daikatana team member, besides Romero, to work on the project from day one through completion. With Green heading up the programming, former Ion Storm webmaster Noel Stephens, who also holds an engineering degree, rejoined the company to help solve the complicated problem of bringing the sidekicks to life.

Green's office is lined with vitamins.

"The sidekicks have only been working really well over the past six months," explained Green in early February, admitting that programming Hiro's virtual companions was one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome. By the end of 1999, even Tom Hall was impressed with the strides programmer Stephens had made. "I thought I'd get 'em," Hall says, explaining how he beta tested the sidekicks. "I went up an elevator, and the sidekick followed me up the elevator." But then the real test came: "I jumped down a long hole Quake-style, cracking my shins," he says. "It didn't follow me! I thought I had it." But little did Hall know that the sidekick was smart enough to find an alternative path. "I turned around, and Superfly had taken the elevator back down [to avoid the freefall.]"

The "Bug Bored" keeps track of bugs in Daikatana.

With so many strides in the right direction, Ion Storm was confident that Daikatana was going to be on store shelves by the end of 1999. In fact, the company was so confident that it went ahead and planned a huge Christmas release party for the game on December 17, 1999. December 17 came and went, and while the party still took place, a sense of irony surrounded the event as everyone was celebrating a game that missed another release date. Still, the team was working in hard-core crunch mode all through December. "We genuinely believed up until the day before we were supposed to go gold that we were going to make Christmas," remembers Romero.

AI programmer Noel Stephens (right) chats with tester Alex Quintana.

But the game didn't make Christmas, and the team broke for a weeklong holiday knowing they would be starting the new millennium with more long hours ahead. "We had to be careful our guys weren't getting burned out," producer Hoerner admits, recalling the nine months of crunch mode the team endured before the game actually went gold.

The plan at Ion was to finish the game in the first few weeks of January. Kavanagh says the extra time was of benefit to the team so they could "add the kind of polish you find in Half-Life" to Daikatana.
 

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