(no subject)

[prog]

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...