At id, the company was rolling in millions of dollars and we just had walls. It was the whole Carmack idea of, “I don’t need anything on my walls, all I need is a table and a computer and a chair,” instead of, “Okay, we’ve got a lot of money, why not make a really bad-ass office?”
— John Romero
Romero is chaos and Carmack is order. Together they make the ultimate mix. But when you take them away from each other, what’s left?
— id Software artist Paul Steed
It was Trip Hawkins who first opened the can of worms. In 1983, to celebrate the release of Electronic Art’s first half-dozen games, he proclaimed their developers to be the rock stars of the new digital generation. The advertising campaign that followed was built around Annie Leibovitz-inspired photographs of his charges, trying a little bit too hard to look cool there in moody black and white, with Pinball Construction Set creator Bill Budge proudly showing off an actual studded leather glove. (“That’s not me really,” he would later admit; he’d bought it for dressing up as a punk rocker at a costume party.) The campaign attracted much comment, then as it still does today, but it appears not to have been all that effective in selling games. Within a few years, EA had backed off the programmers-as-rock-stars angle and was moving toward becoming the faceless corporate collective that gamers know — and in some cases hate — today.
But a dream as enticing as this one could never truly die. Ten and a half years after those airbrushed-cool EA advertisements, a group of scruffy outsiders in Dallas, Texas, unleashed DOOM upon the world. John Carmack and John Romero became the leaders of a movement that remade the culture of computer gaming over the next several years, turning it brasher, bolder, more action-oriented — and, yes, more violent. With his long hair and his penchant for black jeans and heavy-metal tee-shirts, Romero looked more at home with a studded leather glove on his fist than Bill Budge ever had. Within a year or two, he was playing DOOM in the back of a tour bus next to Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.
The reborn rock-star ethos rippled outward from id Software, Carmack and Romero’s company. Suddenly gaming was cool in a way it had never been before. Sony went all-in on rave culture and heroin-chic in promoting its new PlayStation console. David Bowie wrote songs for and lent his voice and persona to Omikron: The Nomad Soul, shortly after the aforementioned Trent Reznor had written the soundtrack for id’s Quake. A fellow named American McGee, who had worked for a few years as a level designer at id, overcame his middling CV with a rock-star-worthy name and rock-star-worthy-looks, making a transgressive shooter based on Alice in Wonderland that would have done Alice Cooper proud, with his own name up in lights there on the front of the box.
But it’s safe to say that no one in gaming did the rock-star thing bigger and better than John Romero himself. DOOM had been his brilliant, dangerous masterpiece, the game the kids all wanted to play as loudly as possible while their parents pined for the more innocent days of Pac-Man. And after DOOM… well, anyone who has ever seen one of those VH1 Behind the Music documentaries knows what has to come next. It was time for him to lose himself in decadent rock-star excess and lose the plot on his art.
Such is the conventional narrative about Ion Storm, at any rate. Is it correct, you ask? Partially — but the tale is also more complex than it might seem on the surface.
In the earliest days of Ion Storm, John Romero and Tom Hall stand outside the mock-Tudor mansion the former bought with his DOOM money.
When we last checked in with John Romero, it was the summer of 1996, and he had just been fired from id Software for some combination of artistic disagreements with John Carmack and dereliction of duty. id’s fandom on the young World Wide Web greeted the news much as their parents had that of the breakup of the Beatles. How could the partnership of opposites that had changed their lives by marrying Carmack’s cutting-edge graphics technology to Romero’s diabolically inventive level designs have fallen apart so quickly?
As it happened, Romero had already been weighing his options for months by the time the axe fell. He’d been considering starting a new studio with his old friend Tom Hall, who’d been fired from id years before for trying to inject too much story into DOOM. Now, Hall was running into much the same problem at 3D Realms, where he had been assigned to a shooter called Prey. (True to form for 3D Realms, who believed in taking their time with their games, Prey wouldn’t be completed until 2006.)
Romero’s firing changed the two men’s talk into action. Feeling the need of a partner in what lay ahead, perhaps still feeling a twinge of guilt for the way Hall’s tenure on DOOM had ended, Romero offered to pay him a salary from his own DOOM windfall while the pair of them got a new studio off the ground. Romero’s stated ethos for the studio reflected the lingering bitterness he felt toward Carmack, who had made it clear that technology — his technology — would always be the primary driver of life at id.
Design is law. What we design is what’s going to be the game. It’s not going to be that we design something and have to chop it up because the technology can’t handle it or because some programmer says we can’t do it. You design a game, you make it, and that’s what you do. That’s the law. It’s the fucking design.
It didn’t take Tom Hall long to turn in his resignation at 3D Realms.
Romero first thought to call the studio Dream Design, but soon decided that sounded too “soft,” like a “mattress brand.” Hall suggested changing it to Ion Design. Then a mutual friend named Kee Kimbrell chortled over the phone one day that “the competition better watch out, or they are going to get caught up in an ion storm!” “We’re done here,” said Romero the moment he heard those words.
Publishers courted the new studio like record labels after a hot new band. Romero and Hall made the rounds of the industry, toasted and feted at every stop: Activision, Origin, Virgin, Mindscape, Acclaim, GT Interactive. Many of these houses had been blindsided by the 3D-action revolution in games, which had sprung up from the hinterlands while they imagined that the future of interactive entertainment was for it to become one with the movies. Now, they hoped to tempt the coolest dude of all from the new scene to come in and save their bacon. Romero dined out on their desperation, unabashedly playing one publisher against another, mocking them for their cluelessness to their faces.
In the course of these journeys, Romero and Hall visited the less prominent publisher 7th Level, who were looking to diversify from educational software into games. In service of that agenda, they had already bought a fledgling studio known as Distant Thunder, founded by one Todd Porter. A nephew of the legendary rockabilly guitarist Chet Atkins, Porter was, in addition to being a pretty good guitarist himself, a former seminary student and male stripper (stage name: Preacher Boy) whose chief claim to gaming fame was a rather excruciating 1989 CRPG called Knights of Legend. (The CRPG Addict, who has far more time and patience for the lesser lights in his favorite genre than I do, spent a staggering 96 hours with it; he numbered among its flaws the fact that you need to enter “ten keyboard commands just to move one step.”) Romero and Hall got to chatting with Porter. One thing led to another, and soon they decided to offer him a job and a stake in Ion Storm. Porter agreed to join, bringing with him his art director from Distant Thunder, Jerry O’Flaherty.
Romero had his fair share of flaws, as these articles will make abundantly clear. And yet, as this episode demonstrates, his enthusiasm for games was honest and almost naïvely heartfelt. On the strength of nothing more than good vibes and good chemistry, he gave Porter and O’Flaherty 25 percent of his new studio each, leaving himself and Hall to split the other half equally. It seemed that he still wanted to be a member of a band, not a solo artist. “At worst, if we disagreed on a company direction, we’d stalemate,” he remembers thinking. Not having much experience running a business, he had no idea how damaging such a stalemate could be.
On Christmas Eve of 1996, Ion Storm closed a deal with Eidos Interactive. The British publisher was already riding high off Tomb Raider, featuring the short-shorted and ludicrously proportioned Lara Croft, who despite her lack of corporeal reality was poised to become an unlikely It Girl of the mainstream zeitgeist. Now that Eidos had a full-blown pinup star, why not add a rock star to the stable? They agreed to pay Ion Storm $3 million in advance for each of three games — one from Romero, one from Hall, and one from Porter — plus a slush fund of another $4 million thrown on top, ostensibly for console rights. And they asked for the right of first refusal on Ion Storm’s next three projects as well, again promising $3 million for each of them in advance if they liked what they were pitched. Once the games reached stores and sold through their advances — that ought to take only about 150,000 unit sales, peanuts in a world where DOOM and Quake had sold in the multi-millions — Eidos would pay a 40-percent royalty directly into Ion Storm’s pocket. It seemed like a spectacularly good deal.
Hall’s game, which would come to be known as Anachronox, was meant to combine the gameplay of Final Fantasy and Super Mario 64 with a story inspired by the novels Battlefield Earth and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Romero was predictably unfazed by this unwieldy collection of influences. Sounds great, he said. Design first and all that.
Porter’s idea was vaguely based on the old horror flick Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Romero described it to the press as “a real-time-strategy, first-person-action, weird hybrid of a game, completely hectic and totally hot.” Make of that what you will.
Romero’s own game was to be called Daikatana. It would send its player and two non-player companions hopscotching through two millennia worth of human history, from late Antiquity to the far future. It was to include shooter elements, but was also to be much more than just another DOOM or Quake. Like Hall, Romero mentioned JRPGs as some of his primary inspirations. Stealing a page from the early playbook of Electronic Arts, some of whose rock-star advertisements had sported the tagline “Can a Computer Make You Cry?,” he said that “I want you to become so emotionally attached to the characters that certain events in the game will make you break down and cry, just like in the opera scene from Final Fantasy III.” Who would have thought the man who had brought the verbs “frag” and “gib” into the lexicon could be such a soft touch?
As true-blue a man of his people as Bruce Springsteen was of his, Romero made it a point to hire his employees from the booming DOOM and Quake modding scenes as much as possible, foregoing for the most part folks with established industry résumés in favor of ones who reminded him of him and his friends from id before DOOM changed their lives forever. They all moved into an anonymous-looking but spacious “starter office” in North Dallas.
Standing from left to right: Bob Wright (a friend of Todd Porter’s, he was COO for a spell), Porter, Tom Hall, John Romero, and Jerry O’Flaherty. Seated: Mike Wilson.
Romero poached id’s marketing director, Mike Wilson, to become Ion Storm’s CEO and head PR man. “Honestly, I didn’t see how it could miss,” Wilson would say later. “I had just driven up the rates for a PC game to well beyond where they had ever been. It went up over the course of a year from, like, a million dollars a game to two or three or four [million] in advances. And I’d just renegotiated the Quake [royalty] rate up into the 40s [percent]. So I knew that the going rates were pretty good. And with John’s name, and Tom’s… you know.”
Wilson and Romero both enjoyed taking potshots in the press at their former colleagues from id, and in particular at John Carmack, behaving rather like John Lennon during his “How Do You Sleep?” phase. The irony of this public feud was that Ion Storm’s three games were actually to run under the Quake engine.
Romero soon learned of the disadvantages of not working in the same office where the technology that powers your dream design is conceived. At the E3 show in June of 1997, id demonstrated the upcoming Quake II. Romero pronounced immediately after he saw it that Ion Storm couldn’t possibly make do with the Quake I engine, that they would have to wait until the sequel was released six months from now — id naturally got first dibs on their own engine — and then update their works-in-progress accordingly. Many members of his own team were confused by his stance; they could make Daikatana just fine with the Quake I engine, they said, then upgrade for the next game. Why was a studio that had pure design as its founding ethos suddenly getting so hot and bothered about polygon counts and screen resolutions? But Romero was adamant; it was the Quake 2 engine or nothing. “If we don’t switch engines,” he said, “it [Daikatana] will look ancient in comparison.” Daikatana, originally projected to be a direct competitor to Quake 2 that Christmas, would have to be pushed to 1998. Hall’s and Porter’s projects would also make the switch, suffering similar delays.
While he waited on his new engine, Romero’s broader ambitions for his studio continued to grow. Unhappy with the company’s unremarkable current digs, he set his heart on the “penthouse” at the top of the 55-story Chase Tower, the third or fourth highest (depending on how you measured it) building in all of Dallas. The soaring ceiling and canted walls of the multi-tiered space were made of glass, giving a view that no other location in the city could match. Yet ten years after the skyscraper had first opened for business, the penthouse was still unoccupied; the real-estate agent explained that many potential tenants had looked at it, only to balk at the rent of half a million dollars per month and the almost equally astronomical cost of air-conditioning the giant glass bubble through the long, hot, sun-drenched Texas summers.
The agent must have danced a jig when Romero said that he would take the white elephant anyway. He hired a contractor to turn it into a gamer’s paradise, complete with a “rec area” with billiard and foosball and ping-pong tables and stand-up arcade machines, a deathmatch arena, a labyrinth, a movie theater, a television lounge, a motion-capture stage, $1500 chairs for everyone, and lots of comfy couches and showers for the many employees who would be encouraged to more or less live in the Ion Storm tree house. The renovations would require months to complete, at a cost of $2.5 million. Incredibly, Mike Wilson managed to convince Eidos to foot the bill, by promising that they could house their board of directors here and use the space as a showcase for visiting press. While they waited on the renovations to be completed, Ion Storm took over the 30th floor of the Chase Tower.
The Chase Tower in downtown Dallas, with the Cathedral Shrine of Our Lady Guadalupe sitting just at its base. This juxtaposition of big business and religion, ultra-modernity and tradition, is Dallas, the city where I grew up, in a nutshell.
Their publisher’s generosity in picking up the renovations tab notwithstanding, Ion Storm was spending money at an alarming rate. A perverse incentive emerged from the terms of their contract with Eidos: to initiate more projects so as to collect more $3 million advance payouts to cover short-term costs. Right from the moment he arrived, Mike Wilson had been telling the others that he wouldn’t have taken the Eidos deal, sweet as it looked. Now that they had, he said that they ought to “burn through” the six games they were on the hook for as quickly as possible, in order to become a publisher in their own right. That was where the real money was, he said. Romero was skeptical, but Wilson found an unexpected ally in this scheme in Todd Porter, who, it was slowly becoming clear, fancied himself an equally smooth and crafty wheeler-dealer. Porter hatched an ingenious if ethically dodgy scheme.
He had heard from his old colleagues from Distant Thunder that 7th Level had gotten cold feet about the games thing after their MechWarrior 2 competitor G-Nome had stiffed. (Computer Gaming World said that G-Nome “perfectly simulates putting a moron in a giant robot.”) They’d decided to cut their losses and get out of games as abruptly as they’d gotten into them, just as Porter’s old gang were about to finish an entrant into the crowded real-time-strategy field called Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3. (“Gift 3” was the name of the planet in the game, not an indication that it was the third in any series.) Ion Storm could buy it for a song, Porter said, give it to four employees for six weeks or so to apply a final coat of spit and polish, and offer it to Eidos. If the publisher accepted it, and if the cost of acquiring Dominion and finishing it worked out to less than $3 million, then they would be able to pocket the difference, even if the game never sold a single copy. Even in the worst case of Eidos saying no thanks, they would still have burned off one of their three options, and would still be free to shop it around elsewhere or publish it themselves. “The only reason we’re thinking about acquiring it is to burn an option, simple as that,” wrote Romero in an email.1
As Porter had hoped, Eidos agreed to pay the advance and publish the game, although it was clear that they weren’t thrilled at the prospect. But nothing else went according to the plan which Porter had pitched to the other founders. He ended up paying 7th Level fully $1.8 million for Dominion — far more than his partners had expected — only to admit once he had it that it was in far worse shape than he had anticipated. He proceeded to hire a group of his own former employees from Distant Thunder to finish it, a task that now looked likely to consume quite some months. The project went out of the black and into the red in December of 1997. It now had to sell decently well if it wasn’t to lose Ion Storm money, $3 million advance or no. The other founders were left wondering whether they had been the victim of guile or incompetence on Porter’s part. It was a question they would find themselves asking again and again as time wore on.
In September of 1997, Ion Storm announced that they had signed a fourth game designer to initiate a fifth development project. Older, bespectacled, and as thoughtful and well-spoken as Romero and his friends were brash and profane, Warren Spector was by no means an obvious candidate to join them. He had made his reputation at Looking Glass Software with Ultima Underworld and System Shock, games which he liked to describe as “immersive sims.” They used the same three-dimensional first-person perspective as DOOM and Quake, but in more cerebral and conceptually ambitious ways that counted combat as just one part of a larger whole. Nevertheless, Romero was a fan, eager to sign him up when he learned that the financially troubled Looking Glass was shutting down the Austin office where Spector was employed. Romero sent him an email: “Dude, you’ve got to join Ion Storm. Let me come down and convince you.” When he arrived, he gave Spector the same pitch he had delivered to Hall and Porter: he could make any game he wanted to make, using $3 million of Eidos’s money. At Ion Storm, nobody would tell him what to do.
Spector found the offer a hard one to refuse, especially after a couple of years of creative frustration at the perpetually short-staffed Looking Glass. At the same time, though, what he saw going on 180 miles to his north in Dallas made him nervous. He would accept, he said, but only if he could stay in Austin, opening his own office there and keeping the rest of Ion Storm at arm’s length. Far from being offended, Romero agreed to his terms. Eidos picked up yet another $3 million option, and Ion Storm could look forward to paying rent on yet another office space. But, setting all that aside, it was, many a gamer will tell you today, the best decision John Romero ever made. For it would result in Deus Ex, one of the most beloved and critically lauded computer games of all time, every inch the silver lining in the Ion Storm story.
Meanwhile the gang in Dallas debated flying out to London together to have their picture taken on the famous Abbey Road crosswalk, a Fab Four for this new pop-culture era of interactivity. Dubious as that idea was, it would surely have made for a better first advertisement for the delayed Daikatana than the one they finally landed on. In lieu of a game to celebrate the Christmas of 1997, Ion Storm rolled out a magazine advertisement which told their fans that “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch. Suck it down!” Mike Wilson judged that last phrase to be such a winner that he took out a trademark on it.
Daikatana had somehow wandered far afield indeed in a remarkably short time from the interactive epic that was supposed to make you cry. It was too much even for some of Romero’s more slavish followers — the ones who non-ironically bowed down to him saying “I’m not worthy!” at trade shows, who looked to him for personal-grooming as well as gaming tips. (“I always flip my hair over in front of my face and look at the floor while using a brush and hair dryer to slowly dry all my hair,” he said of his famous heavy-metal locks. “Brushing downward while drying will help straighten your hair and completely drying it will make sure it doesn’t kink up or curl up.” Who said that gamers were oblivious to fashion?) Instead of seeming edgy and cool, as Wilson had no doubt envisioned, the advert hit all wrong, demonstrating contempt not just for social norms — that was A-okay in the rock-star business — but for Ion Storm’s own most likely customers. The online blowback which ensued was an early indication that there might be some cracks in Romero’s armor, some limits to what even he could get away with. He would have done well to heed the warning when it was presented to him.
By now, the Dallas office was wracked by constant infighting among the senior staff, which made the place feel more dysfunctional by the day. Almost everyone seemed to agree that Todd Porter was the problem; now that he felt free to show his true colors, he was by most accounts an abrasive character indeed. Yet Romero and Hall had no way of getting rid of him, since his loyalist Jerry O’Flaherty would always vote with him to keep him around. Romero was learning a belated lesson on the dangers of a business stalemate.
Yet it turned out to be Mike Wilson rather than Porter who left first under bad terms. The infamous “bitch” advertisement may well have had something to do with it; Romero has long claimed that he was never really onboard with it, that he agreed to it only when Wilson called him a “pussy” for expressing reluctance. But there are also two other stories connected to Wilson’s departure. One involves him “borrowing” $30,000 from the company’s bank account to buy himself a used BMW. He took the money just for the short term, so he said, because “my loan officer is out of town.” But Wilson then proceeded to wreck the car before said loan officer could return, leaving the company out all that money. The other story — the one told by John Romero in his recent memoir — is that Wilson started a games publisher of his own on the side, without telling any of his colleagues, and was fired when they found out. For all we know, of course, both stories might be true. Lord knows, Ion Storm was crazy enough to make that possible.
Whatever the exact reasons for his departure, there is no disputing that Wilson really did announce the new publisher Gathering of Developers — or G.O.D., as he preferred to call it — soon after his departure. In its bare couple of years as an independent going concern, G.O.D. produced a surfeit of revolutionary rhetoric about rescuing the creatives from the predations of the suits, but came out with few games that were reviewed well or that sold much. Its one real hit, before being swallowed up by the much larger publisher Take Two Interactive, was rather out of character for it: the strategy game Railroad Tycoon II. Other than this, G.O.D. was most noted among gamers for its “booth babes,” who at trade shows and especially at invitation-only after-hours parties let it all hang out, so to speak. Whatever else you can say about him, there can be no denying that Mike Wilson worked like a demon to cement the case for game developers as rock stars.
With Wilson went Ion Storm’s own ambition for becoming a game publisher as well as a studio. Indeed, Ion Storm was becoming ever more tightly coupled to Eidos, dependent upon them for their very survival. By the beginning of 1998, Eidos had begun sending a monthly remittance of $1.2 million to Dallas just to keep the doors open. Understandably concerned about the situation, they were starting to make noises about wanting equity in the studio itself in return. It looked like the founders might have to grant this wish, just to keep the lifeline from being pulled out of their grip.
In the midst of it all, in February of 1998, Ion Storm finally moved into the penthouse at the top of the Chase Tower. In addition to all of the other perks, there were free soda and limitless junk food on tap for the nearly 100 employees. Rumor had it that there were other, more illicit substances floating around the place as well, although these were presumably not purchased by the company — not officially, anyway. Call it part and parcel of the rock-star lifestyle.
Oddly few photographs of Ion Storm’s infamous penthouse office space exist. At some point, though, John Romero shared the following pictures, along with explanations of exactly what we are looking at. I found them in a Reddit post by one “Tricky-Adeptness-657.” The photographs appear to have been taken when the offices were mostly cleaned out, probably in the run-up to Ion Storm’s final closure.
The penthouse of the Chase Tower — now known as the Dallas Arts Tower — looks like this today. You can still play table games there, so the continuity with the past is not completely broken.
The penthouse was by no means a failure in its role of providing a showcase for a burgeoning creative industry, of showing that there was enough money flying around here to buy plenty of rock-star decadence. This was something that a mainstream reporter who had never played a computer game more advanced than Solitaire could readily understand and convey to her audience. CNN toured the penthouse for an on-air segment; Entertainment Weekly named Romero one the 100 most important people in its circumscribed world; Time called him the Quentin Tarantino of games; Texas Monthly included him on its list of “Top Twenty Texans”: “John Romero is the reigning bad boy of computer gaming, an image he cultivates with his flowing black hair, devilish smile, passion for fast cars (he’s a self-described ‘maniac’ behind the wheel of his Ferrari Testarossa), and thirst for bloody fights to the death — onscreen, of course.” It seldom came up in such coverage that Ion Storm had yet to finish a game, was in fact hemorrhaging money to no clear purpose.
To find a more skeptical and at least modestly more informed take on the current state of the studio, you had to turn to the gaming websites. Here the bloom had just about come off the rose. Ion Storm’s tone-deaf public relations and lack of concrete progress to show on any of its disparate projects were fast transforming fans’ view of John Romero in particular from worshipful adulation to angry mockery. Hell hath few furies like gamers scorned…
The company’s new fishbowl playground was proving great for every purpose except one: that of actually getting work done. The bright sunlight streaming in from above and every side made it impossible to see the monitor screens. Some employees resorted to working only at night; some went to a hardware store and returned with sheets of black felt, which they taped to the walls and ceiling to keep out the accursed light. They eventually discovered that outdoor patio coverings served the purpose best. The stunning space with its views of the Dallas skyline and of the blue sky overhead, streaked with jet contrails from the nearby airport, turned into a sad-sack tent city, which had to be hastily torn down like a homeless encampment before a police raid whenever a representative of the press came around.
Ion Storm received the Quake II engine from id at long last in the same month that they moved into the penthouse, whereupon the programmers saw that porting Daikatana over to it would be even more complicated than they had thought. Eidos had been told that Daikatana would be ready by March; not for the first nor the last time, Romero had to disappoint them. The publisher was growing steadily more worried and impatient at the endless delays and the lack of focus. Some at Ion Storm hatched a plan, perhaps after indulging in one of those other substances that were said to be floating around the penthouse, to launch a line of comic books. It was unceremoniously squashed by an increasingly interventionist Eidos, but not before illustrators had been hired and computers and specialized software purchased for them to use. The sense of strategic and tactical confusion was palpable. People complained that John Romero and Todd Porter had a different answer to every question that was posed to them, were effectively running two different companies. The stalemate ground on.
Ion Storm was learning the hard way that it was an exercise in diminishing returns to chase the latest, hottest game engine instead of just doing the best work possible with the tools to hand. At the E3 show in May of 1998, the new Quake 2-powered Daikatana looked underwhelming once again, this time when set beside the brand-new Unreal from Epic MegaGames, the first shooter by another studio to up the audiovisual bar on id’s flagship releases. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was also the upcoming shooter Half-Life from a new studio known as Valve, which looked poised to bring a richer story to the genre in much the same way as had been mooted for Daikatana, but with vastly more self-assurance and clarity of purpose; ironically, it made do perfectly well with the old Quake 1 engine. At the same show, Ion Storm’s Dominion, which had still not been released nine months after it had been bought, looked like even more of a long shot than it had before next to Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft.
Nevertheless, the fact remained that Dominion was the only game Ion Storm had that was anywhere close to completion. Todd Porter was convinced, against the evidence of that E3 show, that it could become a hit. He turned down an offer from Compaq to bundle it with their home computers, for a royalty of $1 for every such computer sold, with a guaranteed minimum payout of $1.5 million. His logic was that doing so would “cannibalize” retail sales. When finally released in a standard box in June of 1998, Dominion flopped miserably, selling fewer than 17,000 copies and being named a runner-up for “Coaster of the Year” by Computer Gaming World: “Let’s just hope that Ion Storm learns from this experience before its next game ships, or its legacy may be closer to Blind Faith’s than the Beatles’.” It was not an auspicious retail debut for the most hyped studio in the industry.
In the aftermath of this fiasco, Eidos said that they no longer wanted Ion Storm to bother finishing Porter’s Body Snatchers-style game, despite having already paid $3 million for it. Just get the other games done and all will be forgiven, they said. Porter’s team was split between Romero’s team, Hall’s team, and Warren Spector’s down in Austin. The integration process did not go particularly smoothly.
Still, the infighting at the top was even worse. Instead of hashing out their differences face to face, Romero and Porter took them out on their opposite numbers’ favored underlings. Angry on-the-spot firings became commonplace. Epithets like “fucking rat-faced bitch,” which used to be reserved for deathmatch sessions, became normal office chatter. Someone — maybe many people — were leaking to the gaming websites, which reveled in every petty anecdote. The atmosphere of paranoia and distrust left some employees on the verge of a mental breakdown. The penthouse paradise had turned into Lord of the Flies.
A deal to give Eidos 19 percent of Ion Storm, in return for forgiving all of the advances that had come the latter’s way, fell through on the day when the contract was to be signed, when Eidos was informed that Ion Storm would not have a game ready to go for the coming Christmas either. There were rumors that Eidos was just about ready to pull the plug completely. In the midst of the worry and disappointment, Porter sent out a company-wide email asking if anyone wanted to buy his Lotus sports car, because he was looking to upgrade to a Ferrari like the one Romero had; it was leaked and all over the Internet by the next day. Ditto other emails in which Porter called his colleagues “shit” and implied that he had fired a PR firm because Romero was getting too much of the spotlight.
But by no means did all of the troubles at Ion Storm come down to Porter’s abrasive presence. Romero struck many of his employees as… well, as kind of lazy, a conclusion John Carmack had reached years ago. “If you want the overriding problem with John Romero’s character, I’d say it was his emphasis on being John Romero in the public eye, rather than getting things done — especially the things that made him John Romero in the public eye in the first place,” said one anonymous employee to a journalist. “It’s this idea that, once you’ve reached this pinnacle, life is a free ride and you don’t have to do anything from that point on, which is totally wrong.”
“Some people don’t want to do anything,” said another anonymous employee who preferred to speak still more cryptically. “And to them, it’s not a high price to pay to let someone else take control, if they can still do whatever they want.” It seemed that, for all his popular reputation as gaming’s reigning alpha male, Romero could be weirdly passive — one was almost tempted to say timid — when push came to shove. Most of his people believed, probably correctly, that he had the clout to oust Porter if he really, really wanted to; it wasn’t as if anyone was coming to the Chase Tower penthouse to meet the creator of Knights of Legend. But he just let the situation fester, until those around him were almost as angry at him as they were at Porter.
On November 19, 1998, eight core members of the Daiktana team asked for a meeting with Romero. “We don’t think this game is ever going to get done,” they said. They told him that they had received an offer from Mike Wilson over at G.O.D. to make a shooter starring the veteran rock band KISS, and that they had decided to take him up on it. They were leaving, then and there. All of the free soda, candy, and perks in the world weren’t worth enduring the toxic work environment which Ion Storm had become.
True to form, Romero told the heart of his team not to let the door hit them on their way out. But even as he did so, he could surely all too clearly picture Wilson giggling to himself at having engineered so perfect a revenge for his firing from Ion Storm. How the hell was Romero going to finish his game now?
Predictably enough, the story of the walkout was all over the online gaming sites within hours. Ion Storm had become a soap opera par excellence for people who claimed they hated relationship dramas. Even juicier than Wilson’s knife in the back was the person who now stepped up to take a prominent role in Daikatana‘s design. Having recently split from his second wife, Romero was to elevate his new girlfriend, Stevie “KillCreek” Case, to the position of primary level designer.
The Ion Storm saga was already rife with as much anger, dysfunction, and general decadence as any Behind the Music documentary. Now it was time to complete the tableau with a healthy dose of sex.
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Sources: The books Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, Online Game Pioneers at Work by Morgan Ramsay, and DOOM Guy: Life in First Person by John Romero; Computer Gaming World of October 1996, January 1997, June 1997, June 1998, October 1998, and January 1999; Retro Gamer 75; Dallas Observer of January 19 1999; Texas Monthly of September 1998.
I owe the anecdote about Todd Porter being a nephew of Chet Atkins to a decade-old email exchange with Mark Mark Pelczarski of Penguin Software, who gave Porter his very first job in the industry.
Also the online article “A Hardcore Elegy for Ion Storm” by Christian Divine for Salon.
