4

"Develop Games Like A Rock Star" Turns Out To Be A Bad Business Plan

Russ Berger Design Group

Ion Storm had an office on the top floor of the Chase Tower in Dallas, and that prestigious real estate didn't come cheap -- Matt caught a peek at a budget spreadsheet and saw that the rent was over $1.1 million a month. The way Matt and Zach described the office made it sound awesome but ridiculously impractical, like using an F1 car to commute to your downtown office job.

Wikimedia Commons

If you've never thought of Dallas as a major hub of the game industry, that's because it's not. Ion Storm sure tried their hardest to turn it into one, though -- mostly by backhanding the problem with great wobbling stacks of cash. When Zach was brought in on loan from another company as a "firefighter," he was flown in from L.A. and paid a tidy sum to do so. He wasn't the only one:

"Dallas was a difficult place to staff people with an appropriate background to work on an epic, blockbuster game. John complained about that from time to time, the difficulty of finding people he wanted to have on the team and from bringing people out from the Bay Area."

Russ Berger Design Group

3

The Failure Of Daikatana May Be Why You're Playing Battlecall: Field Of Duty 17

Activision

2

Ion Storm Couldn't Keep Employees, And That Affected The Game

Russ Berger Design Group

Daikatana was the victim of constant leaks, which included a cache of emails that made Ion Storm look like Melrose Place for dorks. They had a turnover rate you generally only see among medical-test volunteers. The high-level in-fighting culminated in eight employees simultaneously leaving in dramatic fashion. Seriously, they all walked out after receiving a cryptic message that said "The monkey has landed" -- the secret signal that the check to start their own studio was in the bank.

Take-Two Interactive

1

Daikatana Inadvertently Changed The Way Games Are Advertised

Eidos Interactive

Much like the first time you had sex, game developers back in 1997 didn't know there was such a thing as too much excitement and anticipation. That's a lesson the industry learned quickly after Daikatana. As Zach points out:

"Projects are announced and revealed in a much more cautious way now. There's not the same urgency to get hype started early. A lot of people at that time thought that anticipation could only be positive, and [Daikatana] was the first time we saw anticipation turn bitter."

Eidos Interactive

If you keep a project relatively secret, you can make as many changes as you need to ensure the final product turns out good -- that's why Cracked's new rap label is evolving nicely. Zach worked on one game where they changed the main character a third of the way through production. They had to throw out a bunch of hard work, but it was necessary to improve the final product. But once you've announced, say, four time periods and dozens of monsters, you're committed to delivering them. As Zach explains:

"Once you have the people with their money spend their marketing dollars, they see that as a commitment. Especially since games have become much more expensive to market. It's become even more essential that you have a very clear message, and you're not going to have people spend their time promoting something too soon."

Eidos Interactive

Video games still hop on board and derail the hype train today, of course (*cough* Destiny *cough*), but Daikatana was hyped up in a way you'll probably never see again. Zach thinks that, had it been made in a different climate, Ion Storm would have quietly killed a whole bunch of ideas before announcing them, gone with something more modest, and given us a perfectly fine game that we'd never know was almost an insane screeching fireball of a failure.

You can check out Matt's portfolio at his website.

For more insider perspectives, check out 6 Inside Facts About Jeopardy From A 74-Episode Winner and 6 Ways Prison Is More Horrifying Than Movies Make It Look.

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