Daikatana
Encyclopedia
John Romero's Daikatana, or simply Daikatana, is a first-person shooter
computer game developed by Ion Storm
and published by Eidos Interactive
. Released on May 23, 2000 for Windows
, it was led by John Romero
. The game is known as one of the major commercial failures of the computer game industry. Daikatana was later ported to the Nintendo 64
. A different version of the game was developed for the Game Boy Color
, with a version for the PlayStation
cancelled during development.
Daikatana' s title is written in Japanese kanji
, and means "large sword", however the characters' usual reading is in fact "daitō". (See etymology of katana.) The name comes from an item in a Dungeons & Dragons
campaign played by the original members of id Software
, which Romero co-founded.
divided into four episodes. The number of maps per level varies, but is generally about three. Each episode represents a different location and time period: futuristic Japan
, ancient Greece
, the Dark Ages in Norway
and near-future San Francisco. Gameplay tends towards fast-paced combat, although an attempt at introducing problem-solving elements was also included.
One element that Daikatana stressed was the important role of the protagonist's two "sidekicks". The death of these sidekicks resulted in the failure of the mission, and their assistance was sometimes required for the completion of puzzles. Due to poor AI
implementation, the sidekicks, who were one of the game's selling points, became a focus of criticism.
caused by a man named Kage Mishima. It is revealed that the current dystopian world, which Mishima rules over with an iron fist, is not what the world is destined to be, and is an alternate timeline created through the use of a magical sword called the Daikatana, which allows its wielder to travel through time. The protagonist takes the form of a martial arts instructor named Hiro Miyamoto. Hiro, along with partners Superfly Johnson and Mikiko Ebihara, attempts to recover the Daikatana and return the Earth to the way its meant to be, travelling to ancient Greece, medieval Norway, near future Los Angeles and futuristic Tokyo in the process.
1997. The game was to license the existing Quake game engine
. At id Software
, the content portion of Quake had taken a nine-person team only six months. Romero had eight artists, and calculated that he could finish in seven. This schedule was called "patently ludicrous" by John Carmack. Put simply, Romero did not have an established, experienced team to rely on, as Ion Storm was still forming as a company, constantly adding new employees. Many were talented amateurs, hired on the basis of level designs they had created.
Ion Storm showed Daikatana at E3 in June 1997. The engine was still running in a software mode, and looked outdated and unimpressive. At the same time, id Software
was debuting their Quake II game engine, featuring hardware acceleration and innovative visuals. Romero realized that they were falling behind technologically. The Christmas 1997 deadline was quietly dropped, and the new plan was to keep creating the content for the game, and switch to the Quake II engine as soon as it was ready. The game was rescheduled for a March 1998 release.
The Daikatana team received the source to the Quake II engine in November 1997, and immediately realized that the switch would not be simple. The code was completely different from the original Quake engine, and would require throwing away eleven months of work for a complete rewrite.
In January 1999, the switch to the Quake II engine was complete. What had been scheduled for a few weeks had taken an entire year to complete. Ion Storm announced that "Come hell or high water, the game will be done on February 15, 1999." This deadline was missed, but a demo was released in March 1999. However, this demo failed to impress players as it featured no monsters and no single player game, only multiplayer deathmatch.
The Daikatana team was then trying to create a new, more impressive demo for E3 that year. Last minute changes to the level design led to a demo that could only run at about 12 frames per second, far less than the 30 frames per second that was considered a minimum for first person shooters. The E3 disaster led to a crisis for Ion Storm. Eidos, the parent company who had thus far financed Ion Storm to the tune of $44 million, had had enough. In June 1999, Eidos and Ion Storm reached an agreement. Eidos got majority ownership of Ion Storm, and founders Todd Porter
and Jerry O'Flaherty
left the company.
On April 21, 2000, Daikatana finally reached gold status
. It sold 200,000 copies, which Romero claimed made up its production costs.
From very early on in the game's development, Daikatana was advertised as the brainchild of John Romero
, a man famous for his work at id Software
in the development of Wolfenstein 3D
, Doom and Quake. Time magazine gave Romero and Daikatana glowing coverage, saying "Everything that game designer John Romero touches turns to gore and gold." An early advertisement for Daikatana, created by marketer Mike Wilson
and reluctantly approved by Romero, was a red poster with large black lettering proclaiming "John Romero's about to make you his bitch", a reference to Romero's infamous trash talk during gaming. Nothing else was featured on this poster but a small tag-line reading "Suck It Down," an Ion Storm logo and an Eidos logo. Romero would later apologize for the advertisement, stating in an interview that "up until that ad, I felt I had a great relationship with the gamer and the game development community and that ad changed everything. That stupid ad. I regret it and I apologize for it."
Following the ad's appearance in several gaming magazines, more negative news came out of Ion Storm, fuelling distaste for the game whose release was pushed back. The lavish rock star
-like treatment given to Romero in his attempt to build a designer-centred game studio (including a multi-million dollar office on the top floor of a Dallas
skyscraper
), Romero's well-publicized expensive tastes and hobbies (such as racing Ferrari
s), the dubious saga of Romero's girlfriend, professional gamer (and later, Playboy
model candidate) Stevie "Killcreek" Case
, being hired on as a level designer, and the game's development (which included most of the original development team quitting en masse to form a competing company called Gathering of Developers
), incited criticism from the online gaming fan community.
Daikatana was delayed multiple times from its conception in early 1997 to its eventual release in 2000. By this time, numerous games based on more advanced graphical technology (such as Id Software's Quake III
and Epic MegaGames
' Unreal Tournament
) had already been released, causing Daikatana to lag technologically in the market with its dated Quake II game engine. Additionally, its gameplay had many aspects that were widely disliked by players, such as an artificially limited number of saves per level and the presence of computer-controlled "sidekicks" who were an impediment to the player. As a result, Daikatana garnered a mediocre reception from reviewers and users.
The game was a major contributing factor in the closure of Ion Storm
's Dallas office. In 2009, ScrewAttack
named this game the #7 bust on their "Top 10 Biggest Busts", which listed the biggest failures in gaming, due to its controversial advertising and the hype that Romero built on this game, but in the end turned out to be a failure. In 2010, GameTrailers
ranked this game the #2 biggest gaming disappointment of the decade, citing the game's terrible AI for friend and foe alike, pushed-back release dates, controversial magazine ad, and gossip-worthy internal drama (among other things) as "the embodiment of game's industry hubris."
First-person shooter
First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...
computer game developed by Ion Storm
Ion Storm Inc.
Ion Storm Inc. was a Texas based developer of computer games founded by John Romero, Tom Hall , Todd Porter, and Jerry O'Flaherty, under the slogan "Design is Law"...
and published by Eidos Interactive
Eidos Interactive
Eidos Interactive Ltd. is a British video game publisher and is a label of Square Enix Europe. As an independent company Eidos plc was headquartered in the Wimbledon Bridge House in Wimbledon, London Borough of Merton....
. Released on May 23, 2000 for Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, it was led by John Romero
John Romero
Alfonso John Romero is a game designer, programmer, and developer in the video game industry. He is best known as a co-founder of id Software and was a designer for many of their games, including Wolfenstein 3D, Dangerous Dave, Doom and Quake...
. The game is known as one of the major commercial failures of the computer game industry. Daikatana was later ported to the Nintendo 64
Nintendo 64
The , often referred to as N64, was Nintendo′s third home video game console for the international market. Named for its 64-bit CPU, it was released in June 1996 in Japan, September 1996 in North America, March 1997 in Europe and Australia, September 1997 in France and December 1997 in Brazil...
. A different version of the game was developed for the Game Boy Color
Game Boy Color
The is Nintendo's successor to the 8-bit Game Boy handheld game console, and was released on October 21, 1998 in Japan, November 19, 1998 in North America, November 23, 1998 in Europe and November 27, 1998 in the United Kingdom. It features a color screen and is slightly thicker and taller than...
, with a version for the PlayStation
PlayStation
The is a 32-bit fifth-generation video game console first released by Sony Computer Entertainment in Japan on December 3, .The PlayStation was the first of the PlayStation series of consoles and handheld game devices. The PlayStation 2 was the console's successor in 2000...
cancelled during development.
Daikatana
Kanji
Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
, and means "large sword", however the characters' usual reading is in fact "daitō". (See etymology of katana.) The name comes from an item in a Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy role-playing game originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. . The game has been published by Wizards of the Coast since 1997...
campaign played by the original members of id Software
Id Software
Id Software is an American video game development company with its headquarters in Richardson, Texas. The company was founded in 1991 by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack...
, which Romero co-founded.
Gameplay
Daikatana is composed of twenty-four levelsLevel (computer and video games)
A level, map, area, or world in a video game is the total space available to the player during the course of completing a discrete objective...
divided into four episodes. The number of maps per level varies, but is generally about three. Each episode represents a different location and time period: futuristic Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
, ancient Greece
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
, the Dark Ages in Norway
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
and near-future San Francisco. Gameplay tends towards fast-paced combat, although an attempt at introducing problem-solving elements was also included.
One element that Daikatana stressed was the important role of the protagonist's two "sidekicks". The death of these sidekicks resulted in the failure of the mission, and their assistance was sometimes required for the completion of puzzles. Due to poor AI
Game artificial intelligence
Game artificial intelligence refers to techniques used in computer and video games to produce the illusion of intelligence in the behavior of non-player characters . The techniques used typically draw upon existing methods from the field of artificial intelligence...
implementation, the sidekicks, who were one of the game's selling points, became a focus of criticism.
Plot
Daikatana takes place during the year 2455 AD, in a world suffering from a major pandemicPandemic
A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or even worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a pandemic...
caused by a man named Kage Mishima. It is revealed that the current dystopian world, which Mishima rules over with an iron fist, is not what the world is destined to be, and is an alternate timeline created through the use of a magical sword called the Daikatana, which allows its wielder to travel through time. The protagonist takes the form of a martial arts instructor named Hiro Miyamoto. Hiro, along with partners Superfly Johnson and Mikiko Ebihara, attempts to recover the Daikatana and return the Earth to the way its meant to be, travelling to ancient Greece, medieval Norway, near future Los Angeles and futuristic Tokyo in the process.
Development
Romero's initial game design, completed in March 1997, called for a huge amount of content—24 levels split into 4 distinct time periods, 25 weapons, and 64 monsters. Despite this, Romero believed that development of the game could be completed in seven months, just in time for ChristmasChristmas
Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...
1997. The game was to license the existing Quake game engine
Quake engine
The Quake engine is the game engine that was written to power 1996's Quake, written by id Software. It featured true 3D real-time rendering and is now licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License ....
. At id Software
Id Software
Id Software is an American video game development company with its headquarters in Richardson, Texas. The company was founded in 1991 by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack...
, the content portion of Quake had taken a nine-person team only six months. Romero had eight artists, and calculated that he could finish in seven. This schedule was called "patently ludicrous" by John Carmack. Put simply, Romero did not have an established, experienced team to rely on, as Ion Storm was still forming as a company, constantly adding new employees. Many were talented amateurs, hired on the basis of level designs they had created.
Ion Storm showed Daikatana at E3 in June 1997. The engine was still running in a software mode, and looked outdated and unimpressive. At the same time, id Software
Id Software
Id Software is an American video game development company with its headquarters in Richardson, Texas. The company was founded in 1991 by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack...
was debuting their Quake II game engine, featuring hardware acceleration and innovative visuals. Romero realized that they were falling behind technologically. The Christmas 1997 deadline was quietly dropped, and the new plan was to keep creating the content for the game, and switch to the Quake II engine as soon as it was ready. The game was rescheduled for a March 1998 release.
The Daikatana team received the source to the Quake II engine in November 1997, and immediately realized that the switch would not be simple. The code was completely different from the original Quake engine, and would require throwing away eleven months of work for a complete rewrite.
In January 1999, the switch to the Quake II engine was complete. What had been scheduled for a few weeks had taken an entire year to complete. Ion Storm announced that "Come hell or high water, the game will be done on February 15, 1999." This deadline was missed, but a demo was released in March 1999. However, this demo failed to impress players as it featured no monsters and no single player game, only multiplayer deathmatch.
The Daikatana team was then trying to create a new, more impressive demo for E3 that year. Last minute changes to the level design led to a demo that could only run at about 12 frames per second, far less than the 30 frames per second that was considered a minimum for first person shooters. The E3 disaster led to a crisis for Ion Storm. Eidos, the parent company who had thus far financed Ion Storm to the tune of $44 million, had had enough. In June 1999, Eidos and Ion Storm reached an agreement. Eidos got majority ownership of Ion Storm, and founders Todd Porter
Todd Porter
Todd Mitchell Porter is a computer and video game developer who has also written the children's book Firefly Fred. He is married to Dallas attorney Liz Porter and lives with his wife and children in Highland Park, Texas.- Game development history :...
and Jerry O'Flaherty
Jerry O'Flaherty
Jerry O'Flaherty , is an American video game art director and filmmaker best known as Art Director on Gears of War from Epic Games and as the Director on the Warner Bros. feature film "Thundercats". He co-authored the book Destroyed Beauty: An Inside Look at Gears of War. O'Flaherty began in the...
left the company.
On April 21, 2000, Daikatana finally reached gold status
Golden master
In hardware and software development, a golden master is the reference model from which copies are mass-produced. An analogy is made to the production of certain types of physical media...
. It sold 200,000 copies, which Romero claimed made up its production costs.
Nintendo 64 version
The Nintendo 64 version of Daikatana has received harsh criticism. Since it was rushed through development (it was released about 3 months after the PC version), significant concessions were made, and many of the flaws of the PC version were retained. For one, the quality of the graphics was significantly lowered. In order to keep the frame-rate up, large amounts of fog were added to certain levels, particularly in Greece. The graphics were also blurred tremendously. The characters Superfly Johnson and Mikiko Ebihara were completely removed from gameplay, yet they were retained in all of the cut scenes.Controversy
John Romero
Alfonso John Romero is a game designer, programmer, and developer in the video game industry. He is best known as a co-founder of id Software and was a designer for many of their games, including Wolfenstein 3D, Dangerous Dave, Doom and Quake...
, a man famous for his work at id Software
Id Software
Id Software is an American video game development company with its headquarters in Richardson, Texas. The company was founded in 1991 by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack...
in the development of Wolfenstein 3D
Wolfenstein 3D
Wolfenstein 3D is a video game that is generally regarded by critics and gaming journalists as having both popularized the first-person shooter genre on the PC and created the basic archetype upon which all subsequent games of the same genre would be built. It was created by id Software and...
, Doom and Quake. Time magazine gave Romero and Daikatana glowing coverage, saying "Everything that game designer John Romero touches turns to gore and gold." An early advertisement for Daikatana, created by marketer Mike Wilson
Mike Wilson (CEO)
Mike Wilson, aka Michael S. Wilson as a , has been a computer and video game executive since 1995, when he worked at DWANGO as VP of Development for 6 months before being hired by id Software to handle marketing and start up their own self-publishing....
and reluctantly approved by Romero, was a red poster with large black lettering proclaiming "John Romero's about to make you his bitch", a reference to Romero's infamous trash talk during gaming. Nothing else was featured on this poster but a small tag-line reading "Suck It Down," an Ion Storm logo and an Eidos logo. Romero would later apologize for the advertisement, stating in an interview that "up until that ad, I felt I had a great relationship with the gamer and the game development community and that ad changed everything. That stupid ad. I regret it and I apologize for it."
Following the ad's appearance in several gaming magazines, more negative news came out of Ion Storm, fuelling distaste for the game whose release was pushed back. The lavish rock star
Rock music
Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...
-like treatment given to Romero in his attempt to build a designer-centred game studio (including a multi-million dollar office on the top floor of a Dallas
Dallas, Texas
Dallas is the third-largest city in Texas and the ninth-largest in the United States. The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the largest metropolitan area in the South and fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States...
skyscraper
JPMorgan Chase Tower (Dallas)
Chase Tower is a , 55-story postmodern skyscraper at 2200 Ross Avenue in the City Center District of downtown Dallas, Texas. Although it is the fourth tallest skyscraper in the city, if one were to exclude antennas and spires, it would be the third. It is also the 12th tallest building in Texas...
), Romero's well-publicized expensive tastes and hobbies (such as racing Ferrari
Ferrari
Ferrari S.p.A. is an Italian sports car manufacturer based in Maranello, Italy. Founded by Enzo Ferrari in 1929, as Scuderia Ferrari, the company sponsored drivers and manufactured race cars before moving into production of street-legal vehicles as Ferrari S.p.A. in 1947...
s), the dubious saga of Romero's girlfriend, professional gamer (and later, Playboy
Playboy
Playboy is an American men's magazine that features photographs of nude women as well as journalism and fiction. It was founded in Chicago in 1953 by Hugh Hefner and his associates, and funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother. The magazine has grown into Playboy Enterprises, Inc., with...
model candidate) Stevie "Killcreek" Case
Stevie Case
Stevana "Stevie" Case is a recognized figure from the video game industry. She is noted for being one of the first well-known female gamers...
, being hired on as a level designer, and the game's development (which included most of the original development team quitting en masse to form a competing company called Gathering of Developers
Gathering of Developers
Gathering of Developers was a Texas-based PC and video games publishing company, founded in January 1998 with the mission to bridge the gap between publishers and independent game developers, allowing independent developers creative control over their projects, ownership of their IP, and...
), incited criticism from the online gaming fan community.
Daikatana was delayed multiple times from its conception in early 1997 to its eventual release in 2000. By this time, numerous games based on more advanced graphical technology (such as Id Software's Quake III
Quake III Arena
Quake III Arena , is a multiplayer first-person shooter video game released on December 2, 1999. The game was developed by id Software and featured music composed by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly...
and Epic MegaGames
Epic Games
Epic Games, Inc., also known as Epic and formerly Epic MegaGames, is an American video game development company based in Cary, North Carolina. Its most recent success has been the Gears of War series of games, although it is also known for its Unreal Engine technology. It is the parent company of...
' Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament is a futuristic first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was published in 1999 by GT Interactive. Retrospectively, the game has also been referred to as UT99 or UT Classic to differentiate it from its numbered sequels...
) had already been released, causing Daikatana to lag technologically in the market with its dated Quake II game engine. Additionally, its gameplay had many aspects that were widely disliked by players, such as an artificially limited number of saves per level and the presence of computer-controlled "sidekicks" who were an impediment to the player. As a result, Daikatana garnered a mediocre reception from reviewers and users.
The game was a major contributing factor in the closure of Ion Storm
Ion Storm Inc.
Ion Storm Inc. was a Texas based developer of computer games founded by John Romero, Tom Hall , Todd Porter, and Jerry O'Flaherty, under the slogan "Design is Law"...
's Dallas office. In 2009, ScrewAttack
ScrewAttack
ScrewAttack . is a video game-related website that showcases original entertainment for an audience of video game enthusiasts. Its content is also shown on GameTrailers and IGN...
named this game the #7 bust on their "Top 10 Biggest Busts", which listed the biggest failures in gaming, due to its controversial advertising and the hype that Romero built on this game, but in the end turned out to be a failure. In 2010, GameTrailers
GameTrailers
GameTrailers is a media website that specializes in video game related content. It provides free access to original programming , game trailers and recorded game play. Along with standard definition , many of the video clips are offered in a higher resolution .Users can upload videos, create...
ranked this game the #2 biggest gaming disappointment of the decade, citing the game's terrible AI for friend and foe alike, pushed-back release dates, controversial magazine ad, and gossip-worthy internal drama (among other things) as "the embodiment of game's industry hubris."