Daikatana - What Happened?

welcome back to another episode of wha-ha-ha the show where we take a stroll to the halls of shame the corridors of catastrophe and the basement of bumbles in the games industry sometimes things hop on which results in publishers releasing games broken unfinished or just plain bad and a few games exemplify this better than our subject today daikatana do you want a story featuring clashing egos expensive cars backdoor dealings firings hirings and monumental failure well this one's got it all my friends die katana or big sword in Japanese is one of the coolest monikers for a video game ever and that name alone is one of the few that elicits an immediate and visceral reaction it ranges from Oh God shut up Dyke ties the worst - what's what's like katana and especially get out of my bathroom at well for the uninitiated it was a first-person shooter released in 2000 on the PC with ports on the Nintendo 64 and the Game Boy Color is that right Game Boy Color okay and directed produced and designed by one John Romero who is John Romero well he's a [ __ ] rockstar now - make sure to set the scene here we need to go back to the beginning of this man's career one that was filled with dizzying heights terrifying lows and creamy middles the early 90s were a fascinating time for the game industry for developers especially anyone's started realizing they could make a lot of money a lot of fast if they were shrewd enough and had the right tech and Romero at both he started out working for the company softness along with super nerd John Carmack and a few other talented young designers but Romero was always thinking of the side hustle is your fledgling company stuck making boring games for some bland publisher well then use their computers when they're not looking to develop Commander Keen for another company Carmack's programming wizardry in making capable engines afforded the other members of the team to design their games to move faster and smoother than anything seen on the PC up to that point they christened themselves ed software and made a few other things you might have heard of Wolfenstein 3d doom doom to quake the the list is well-known aside from these games selling well and being critically praised they were also simultaneously revolutionizing the PC space as well with that kind of success comes a bit of ego maybe a lot of ego and money of course and like we already hinted Romero had been full of the former and very quickly gained the latter however it became apparent that both John's had different philosophies on how to handle all this newfound success Carmack was inconspicuous and preferred to be programming away in his spare time while Romero was a more out there personality doing interviews posing like a dork for magazines and of course indulge in a game developers favorite pastime when they've hit it big buying expensive cars a ruthless always kind of bear between the two and around the completion of quake which was Romero's first time the directing chair things came to a head the development of quake despite winding up as a classic upon completion was still fraught with a lot of speed bumps Romero was accused by his bosses at IDI for not being a hundred percent focused on the project and apparently led his team around in circles for months while this may be conjecture it was true that Romero did have his time split in other directions as he was helping Raven Software with exes in addition to directing quake within the corporate structure of it however Romero felt his desire to push game design was secondary to just shipping it and was frustrated that while he wanted to come up with new features and really make quake all that it could be he was being pressured to simply finish it he was unhappy during the last few months of the development period so he started the groundwork of setting up his own company and even invited former IDI designer Tom Hall to go all in with him while exact details are sketchy here it seemed somehow Romero's bosses at Eid maybe found out about all this so they just fired him Oh boat that simplifies matters then with no longer any commitment to it Romero was free to start up his new venture with a name only Rockstar developers could come up with ion storm now right here let's let's play a game of protect total fantasy let's say you're a famous rich person in the late 90s you then quickly decide to spend millions and millions of dollars on your knees start up company right remember who helped make [ __ ] doom you buy a twenty-two thousand square foot studio put in [ __ ] koi ponds in your Lobby and hire coke-snorting robot maids then at a press conference you tilt down your sunglasses and say listen up our first games gonna be Jai katana drop the mic and let the hype create itself that's a crazy and outlandish scenario isn't it well that's exactly what Romero did when he announced his new project except for maybe the koi ponds and robots man that that might be true daikatana was indeed announced in early 1997 with a promise that it would see a late Christmas release that year or early 1998 if things go really bad now if you're a paying attention earlier you'll remember that big sword eventually released in mid-2000s think things went really bad so wha oh so many things the first major one is that it's pretty [ __ ] ambitious to start a brand new company in the early stages of fully 3d games announce that your game exists and then say it'll be out by the end of the year like if there's any time things can go wrong and go wrong bad it's when everyone is still kind of grappling with 3d engines especially when you no longer have turbo nerd programming gremlin to help you out of a jam Romero didn't want to be beholden by technology like he felt he had been at it with so much emphasis being placed on the engine and instead felted better license out pre-existing ones and then focus on a design with that in mind he made another really ballsy move license the quake engine from edy one that he obviously knew pretty well and work off that things were progressing fairly well initially but after months of development Romero and the rest of ion storm realized that new tech wasn't just coming out of hid software anymore and other developers were playing catch-up now gameplay wise quake wasn't doing anything drastically new his 3d engine certainly did it was fast and responsive everyone else wanted their games to run like that there was even a developer out there making something called unreal yeah regardless it became clear that quakes engine was fast becoming antiquated and daikatana needed to impress literally everyone in the world for it to make the impact Romero wanted hard to do that on an engine that was already being outclassed by newer ones they needed something cutting-edge and they needed it now which did Romero choose ed tech to of course his former employer put out the sequel to quake very fast in fact and released right when dike katana was supposed to come out in December of 1997 it's pretty wild that its software company Romero felt overtime was stifling him creatively we're still the ones that were inadvertently pushing him in certain directions still though the feeling was that with ion storms experienced working with the original quake tech who had make for an easy transition to its successor right big no the two engines couldn't have been more different as in tech 2 was a massive jump forward everything would need to be redone recoded and worst of all nothing could be Ryu used they scrapped everything they had worked on up until that point this was a massive gamble as daikatana was already going to miss its original target release date of 1997 and they basically be back to the drawing board if they used ed tech - even if everything went perfectly the best estimate would be they'll maybe late 1998 for the game to come out John Romero wanted to have the best looking game he could so the dice was rolled one of the main tenants he wanted the game to adhere to is the quake he always wanted to make without the restrictions and timelines of bureaucrats holding him back he was going to make a first-person shooter yes but he would design something it seemingly had no interest in at the time something different now is a good time as any to talk about what daikatana or sorry big sword actually is one thing can certainly save for the game is that has no shortage of new ideas scope and innovation taking place in the near future of 24:55 aren't main hero hero Miyamoto pardon the interruption Amazon is visited by a gross old man who starts banging on about how cool the [ __ ] daikatana is and really trying to get the weapon over he tells of warring Japanese clans fighting throughout the generations to attain this magic sword ancient betrayals and descendants and time travel and [ __ ] for a first-person shooter in the late 90s before early 2000s in this case it's an impressively fleshed out story not only that all this narrative comes fully voice-acted with in-game cinematics and definitely has its own palatable sense of style quite the opposite of in software games at the time this spring's true since John Carmack famously once said story in a game is like story in a porn movie it's expected to be there but it's not important which is a pretty profound quote if you think about it I mean look if there's one guy that's watched thousands of millions of hours of porn it's Carmack jokes aside while that cent seems pretty harsh and narrow-minded on its own it's actually way more harsh in context in the fantastic book masters of doom it was revealed that Carmack said it directly to Tom Hall in a conversation the same Tom Hall who happened to be working on dooms narrative elements at the time mr. Hall quit it soon after aa classic robotic unfeeling Carmack back to big sword not only was the story a much more involved affair it wasn't just fluff to simply set things up I mentioned time-travel earlier and that's woven into the game pretty prominently you visit for different time periods across 24 different levels and the story takes various twists and turns along the way mostly involving the allegiances and well-being of your teammates yes daikatana is big defining feature a I controlled BOTS that fought alongside you this was mostly unheard of at the time two intelligent NPCs that followed and backed up the player for the entire game that would also help you solve the puzzles and if they died in a level it would also result in a game over what could go wrong yeah if the AI wasn't great which it wasn't for being one of dai katanas main gameplay hooks it was a disaster for ion storm to not nail this aspect of the design your buddies would often be the cause of unavoidable game overs would get stuck on level geometry and a bevy of other issues well this was a definite problem it only compounded things because of the rest of the game couldn't really make up for it the graphics were still outdated in 2000 ho-hum shooting mechanics and lots more bugs and glitches hampered the game overall when it comes down to it though it all boils down to hype being one of the most negative factors that impacted big sword the game had been delayed so many times making so many e3 appearances each one being less and less impressive as time went on it really did seem like Romero's ambition was outpacing the need to actually ship the sure there were legit technological reasons for a lot of those delays with the engine switch taking months and months of additional dev time but looking back on it now it seems like the smarter choice would have been rut Romero hated the most stripping out features and cutting content to make sure the game ships so all these delays just just made it worse oh man when this thing finally comes out it's gonna blow her [ __ ] minds though but it wasn't going to it was a pretty standard FPS with some ambition in the storytelling and some neat features but was never designed to be much more than that it just took too long to come out now up until this point we've been exclusively talking about the PC version yes as strange as it seems an n64 port also came out day and day with ion storms version and even stranger still it was a port handled by Japanese publisher CEM Koh this version is weird and feels like a slower paced fan mod than anything else as expected it also has dramatically scale back cutscenes with no voice over is missing levels horrible looping music for each time period and something I only found out during the making of this video was a blockbuster exclusive rental for months yeah you couldn't even buy the goddamn thing until Christmas of that year in which case you'd be pretty pissed if this was under your tree at that point camco had no faith in the brand anymore and that's why the after mention and incomprehensible gameboy color version never saw release in North America I mean why bother when the main game is bombing as hard as it was who give a hot [ __ ] about playing a gameboy version of it that being said this port is a curio in the purest sense of the word it's actually a top-down action RPG a bit akin to Zelda apparently Romero requested the game to be designed this way as he felt it would be a better fit for the handheld it even reviewed pretty well huh at least that's kind of neat so now is the point in the video where we basically point to the WrestleMania sign for an awkward amount of time there there it is soak it all in well a lot of blame can be laid at Romero's feet for the actual development of daikatana this is not one of those things a marketing sleazeball let's call him Paul was hard to generate more height for the game and he pitched this infamous advert to Romero by saying we'll make a lot of waves and be something called edgy Romero thought at the time it was risky and had some serious doubts but still gave it the green light nonetheless not only was this a classless advertisement wasn't really selling or advertising the game just the idea of it more accurately its director since there wasn't really much footage of daikatana in 1997 and 98 mostly because the game barely existed this is all they had to work with and hey that marketing guy would you believe was fired shortly after this advertisement came out that's that's just crazy Romero has given several interviews throughout the years apologizing for the ad and saying it was a mistake so good on him for owning up to the thing that was bad let's let's all move on now at this point ion storm had lost a lot of money on daikatana big sword when it failed to sell the billion units who is projected to but the year 2000 had at least one bright spot the company had a sister office in Austin Texas which produced a little thing called Deus [ __ ] X or just deus ex for short Romero and Hall had nothing to do with the title as it was the brainchild of Warren Spector and Harvey Smith and of course would win several Game of the Year awards but unfortunately only sold modestly well and it wasn't enough to save the company Romero and Hall left in 2001 and their Dallas office was closed down but the Austin one soldier Don and produced Invisible War and the the franchise for ieldofs so at least they went out with some decent titles before finally closing up shop in 2005 Romero would have a very tumultuous and checkered history over the next few years as he joined up a flophouse favorite Midway Games and became the project lead on gauntlet Seven Sorrows Midway's sad attempt to reboot the gauntlet franchise and get away from all that annoying fun arcade fantasy roots that everyone loved the game is almost worthy to get its own episode of wha-ha-ha but I don't want to the one thing I will expand upon is that development on gauntlet was so rocky Romero would leave the team months before the game was even close to being finished and Midway would remove the characters he created specifically for the cycle Jam ever since then John er would bounce around between mobile development starting up smaller companies closing them again and seemingly has retired from active game development only to now do interviews about the good old days when he was on top of the world like I said before though I honestly feel that daikatana received overly harsh criticism because expectations were so high as well as people still being pissed about that blindingly read magazine advert it's not a good game yeah you know for sure but if it had managed to somehow come out at the end of 97 I don't think it would have received the critical drubbing and eventually got almost three years later in mid 2000 where sadly it became the entire game industry's bench until Duke Nukem Forever came along hey if you know of any other gargantuan gaming grenades that exploded in a spectacular explosion of failure let me know in the comments below or hit me up at maddening muscles at gmail.com thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 702,609

Rating: 4.9059701 out of 5

Keywords: Daikatana, Let's Play Daikatana, Doom, Quake, Video Game retrospecitve, Wha Happun, Super Best Friends Play, Two Best Friends Play, Matt McMuscles Flophouse

Id: 5Qy9ihyQ75M

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/alexandrecau]

Man the sonic boom gang t-posing looks like knuckles stumble in a cult

[u/[deleted]]

Matt forgot probably the biggest limiting factor to Daikatana's success, and that it was soon completely eclipsed by the genre defining mega hit Omikron The Normal Soul.

Released only a month later.

[u/The_Draigg]

Matt was pretty close about John Romero spending cash on koi ponds for the lobby of the Ion Storm offices. If I remember correctly, he bought a huge fancy statue with the Ion Storm logo put into the lobby of the skyscraper where the studio was located. And that’s in addition to the massive movie screening room, a room with over a dozen TV screens devoted entirely to playing deathmatch, and big skylights installed in the office that kept on nearly giving everyone heatstroke.

[u/RioGascar]

I honestly wanna see a movie based on the production and following of DOOM. Like it is a rockstar tale with all the bells and whistles of those sorta documentary movies. I’d love to see a straight outta compton style movie like that.

Heck it could end with romero being fired and walking out going “im gonna call it big sword” and smash cut to a montage footage of the e3 years and ending with the split with deus ex and dakatana

[u/jenkind1]

X-Men: Destiny seems like a decent enough game. But WHA HAPPUN?

[u/ChildishChimera]

Wait so why did he make the story about a Sword if the game is a shooter? Why not some kind of super prototype gun?

[u/r4Wilko]

So wha happun to the Wha Happun video Woolie wanted to do until Matt revealed he beat him to the punch on making a video series with that name?

[u/radda]

When's Advent Rising tho

[u/KingNothing305]

>Produced Inviable War and the third game in the Thief franchise for Eidos so at least so at lease they went out with some DECENT titles

NO. Neither game was decent