Ion Storm

» see ionstorm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 2000 i was sixteen, on a modem in ankara. Ion Storm was not a company anybody around me had contact with. It was a story you followed at a distance in the game press, and by the time i was following it the press had already decided what the story was going to be, which was a fall.

It was founded on 15 november 1996 in Dallas by John Romero and Tom Hall, both of whom had just walked out of id Software carrying Doom money and Doom reputations. Todd Porter and Jerry O'Flaherty came in with them. They took the 54th floor of Chase Tower and spent something like two million dollars fitting it out with glass walls and arcade machines. Nothing had shipped yet.

In april 1999 Eidos Interactive bought 51 percent of the company in exchange for the advances that were keeping it alive. The deal came with a contract for six games. Ion Storm shipped all six, and one of them mattered.

Daikatana is the part everyone remembers, and it is remembered slightly wrong. It was late by three years and it was not a catastrophe of a game so much as an ordinary one attached to an extraordinary amount of noise.

~ the record ~

~ the ad ~

In late 1997 a magazine ad ran as black text on a white page: John Romero's about to make you his bitch. Suck it down. Romero apologized for it in 2010 and said it changed everything about how the game would be received, which is the correct read. It set a level of expectation that nothing shipping in 2000 was going to clear.

When Daikatana finally arrived in may 2000 it ran on a modified Quake II engine into a market that had already had Half-Life for a year and a half. The reviews landed around the middle. For a game that had promised in public to humiliate you, the middle was the worst available outcome.

~ the other half ~

The Austin office is the reason this grave is not only a joke. Warren Spector ran it, having come from Origin Systems and before that from tabletop design, and in june 2000 his team shipped Deus Ex. It let you finish a level by talking your way through it or by never being seen at all, and it did not punish you for either. It was the only critical and commercial success the company ever had, and it is still on the lists.

Austin also made Deus Ex: Invisible War in 2003 and Thief: Deadly Shadows in 2004, both built with a console controller in mind, both received as smaller than the thing before them. That reception was partly fair and partly a symptom of what Deus Ex had done to expectations.

~ what really happened ~

Dallas closed in july 2001. Romero and Hall had already gone. Anachronox came out that june as the last thing the office produced, a strange and well liked RPG built on the Quake II engine that almost nobody bought.

Austin lasted three and a half more years. On 9 february 2005 Eidos, in financial trouble itself, announced the office was closing. The six game contract had been finished. There was no scandal at the end and no ad campaign, just a publisher short of cash shutting a studio that had done what it agreed to do.

~ what replaced it ~

Spector went on to found Junction Point, which Disney bought and then closed in 2013. Harvey Smith, lead designer on Deus Ex, ended up running Arkane's Austin studio, which made Dishonored and then Prey. Both of those are Deus Ex descendants in everything except the name on the box.

Microsoft closed Arkane Austin in may 2024, which finishes the line properly. Daikatana is the punchline and Deus Ex is the reason anyone still says the name out loud. They came out of the same company in the same year, about a month apart.

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