(no subject)

I follow electronic gaming culture only peripherally, so I found the ~5-year-old GameSpot article Knee-Deep in a Dream (discovered through a boredom-fueled Wikipedia romp) very interesting. It relates the whole sad saga of John Romero's Ion Storm company and its Daikatana project, doomed from the start thanks to a raft of terrible decisions, from its first insultingly egotistical magazine ads to its willful ignorance of every Brooksian development principle.

The article strikes me on another level: it's journalism for a video-game audience (i.e. it doesn't feel obliged to pause and explain what, for example, a level designer does) that's actually really well-written; it's news-magazine quality. This is something I haven't really seen before. I'm going to see if this person's written any more stories...

Fair Play

John Romero's own Daikatana page. Includes a front-and-center link to that same article, as well as his version of the disastrous development timeline, and a downloadable ROM of the GameBoy version of Daikatana, which was never released in the US. Nice!

The whole site's kind of a fun read all around. For someone who was portrayed as a gaming-industry prima donna five years ago, it's surprisingly lacking in giant throbbing ego (or I just haven't hit those pages yet). If Romero wasn't misrepresented in the press, then he has grown up a lot since then...