Daikatana is a first-person shooter video game developed by Ion Storm Inc. and published by Eidos Interactive on April 22, 2000. It is known as one of the List of commercial failures in computer and video gaming. The game has appeared on such platforms as Microsoft Windows, Game Boy Color and Nintendo 64. The PlayStation version was cancelled.

= Overview=

The protagonist of the game is Hiro Miyamoto, a martial arts instructor in 2455 AD. The world, ruled over by a man named Kage Mishima, is in the grip of a major pandemic. Kage Mishima was able to cause the pandemic by using a magical sword called the daikatana, which allowed him to travel back in time to prevent the disease from being cured. The game is based around Hiro s attempts to recover the daikatana, a task which involves travelling to a number of different times and places.

Hiro is joined by two other people Superfly Johnson, a former soldier for Kage Mishima, and Mikiko Ebihara, the daughter of the scientist who informed Hiro of the problem.

= Gameplay =

Daikatana has a total of twenty-four levels, divided into four episodes. The number of maps per level varies, but is generally about three. The episodes represent different locations and time periods futuristic Japan, ancient Greece, the Dark Ages in Norway, and futuristic San Francisco. Gameplay tends towards fast-paced combat, although an attempt was made to include problem-solving elements as well.

One element that Daikatana stressed was the important role of the protagonist s two sidekicks . The death of these sidekicks resulted in the failure of the mission, and their assistance was sometimes required for the completion of puzzles. The presence of computer controlled allies in a first-person shooter was considered quite unusual at the time, and did not see wide use in games until a number of years later.

= Controversy =

Although far from the first or the last high-budget flop in the gaming industry, Daikatana was unusual in that it garnered a fair amount of attention in the American press, starting with an unflattering company profile in the local Dallas Observer newspaper, but quickly gaining notice nationwide. Although geeky in its particulars, the general thrust of the story was classic rags-to-riches-to-rags Americana, with greed, libido, ambition, arrogance, lawyers and outsized egos all meshing with predictably poor results. The computer gaming industry was already being compared to Hollywood, and here at last was its own Heaven s Gate (movie) .

From very early on in the game s development, it had been aggressively advertised as the brainchild of John Romero, a man famous for his work at id Software in the development of Quake and Doom . Time magazine gave Romero and Daikatana [http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1101970623-137916,00.html glowing coverage], proclaiming Everything that game designer John Romero touches turns to gore and gold. An infamous early advertisement for Daikatana was a red poster with large black lettering proclaiming John Romero s about to make you his bitch . Nothing else featured on this poster but a small tag-line reading Suck It Down and an Ion Storm logo.

From the lavish rock-star like treatment given to Romero in his attempt to build a designer-centered game studio (including a multimillion-dollar office on the top floor of a Dallas, Texas skyscraper), to Romero s expensive tastes and hobbies (such as racing Ferrari), the dubious saga of Romero s girlfriend (and occasional Playboy model) Stevie Case (Killcreek) being hired on as a level designer, and most of all the tortured path of the game s development (which included most of the original development team quitting en masse to form a competing company), all of the elements for a classic soap opera were in place. The then-emergent online gaming fan community and online press were the ideal medium for the story to play out in, with regular leaks from disgruntled former (and current) employees providing ample and regular doses of new drama to keep interest in the story high. Several online industry gossip websites came into existence primarily to track the unfolding debacle, some of which are still publishing today.

Due to these and more problems, Daikatana was delayed multiple times from its conception in early 1997 to its eventual release in 2000. By this time, numerous games based on more advanced graphical technology (such as Id Software s Quake III Arena ) had already been released, making certain that Daikatana could not hold up technologically with its dated Quake II game engine. Additionally, its gameplay had many aspects that were widely disliked by players, such as an artificially limited number of saves per level and the presence of computer-controlled sidekicks who were an active impediment to the player. Worst of all, many of the game s features that had been touted as revolutionary in 1997 had by 2000 not only been done multiple times before, but in most people s opinion done better. The game was critically panned, and appeared on numerous top 10 worst games listings.

Daikatana ultimately ended Romero s career in the high-end PC gaming industry and was a major contributing factor in the closure of Ion Storm Inc. Dallas office Romero moved on to run a much smaller company, Monkeystone, which produced games for handheld devices.

= Development history =

Romero s initial game design, completed in March 1997, called for a huge amount of content -- 24 levels split into 4 distinct time periods, 25 weapons, and 64 monsters. Despite this, Romero believed the game could be completed in seven months, just in time for Christmas 1997. The game was to license the existing Quake engine. While at id Software, the content portion of Quake had taken a nine-person team only six months. Romero had 8 artists, and calculated that he could finish in seven. This schedule was called patently ludicrous by John Carmack. What Romero had failed to realize was that he did not have an established, experienced team to rely on. Ion Storm was still forming as a company, constantly adding new employees. Many were talented amateurs, hired on the basis of level designs they had created.

Ion Storm showed Daikatana at E3 in June 1997. Unfortunately, the engine was still running in a software mode, and looked dated and unimpressive. At the same time, id software was debuting their Quake II engine, featuring hardware acceleration and innovative visuals. Romero realized that they were falling behind technologically. The Christmas 1997 deadline was quietly dropped, and the new plan was to keep creating the content for the game, and switch to the Quake II engine as soon as it was ready. The game was rescheduled for a March 1998 release.

The Daikatana team received the source to the Quake II engine around Thanksgiving 1997, and immediately realized that the switch would not be simple. The code was completely different from the original Quake engine, and would require throwing away eleven months of work for a complete rewrite.

Even this would not have prevented the release of Daikatana in 1998, but internal company politics began to erode morale. Ion Storm had grown extremely quickly, and was spending money freely. The Dominion (computer game) project, put on a fast path by Ion Storm in a desperate attempt to generate some revenue, was resented by the Daikatana team for stealing resources from their project. In November 1998, morale got so bad that twelve members of the Daikatana team quit, leaving Romero with no team, and no way to make the Christmas 1998 deadline.

In January 1999, the switch to the Quake II engine was complete. What had been scheduled for a few weeks had taken an entire year to complete. Ion Storm proudly announced that Come hell or high water, the game will be done on February 15, 1999. This deadline was missed, but a demo was released in March 1999. However, this demo failed to impress players as it featured no monsters and no single player game, only multiplayer deathmatch.

The Daikatana team was then frantically trying to create a new, far more impressive demo for E3 that year. Last minute changes to the level design led to a demo that could only run at about 12 frames per second, far less than the 30 frames per second that was considered a minimum for first person shooters. The E3 disaster led to a crisis for Ion Storm. Eidos, the parent company who had financed Ion Storm to the tune of $25 million so far, had had enough. In June 1999, Eidos and Ion Storm reached an agreement. Eidos got majority ownership of Ion Storm, and founders Todd Porter and Jerry O Flaherty left the company.

Despite this turmoil, and the departure of the fourth lead programmer on the project since its inception, Daikatana was nearing release. Ion Storm was confident enough in its progress to schedule a huge release party for December 17, 1999. This date came and went like all the previous ones, as the bug testing, ambitiously scheduled for a few weeks, dragged out into several months. On April 21, 2000, Daikatana finally reached gold status.

= Name =

Daikatana is written with the Japanese kanji ; these characters appeared on the cover of the game s box. The characters literally mean large sword in Japanese, a name which comes from an item in a long-running Dungeons & Dragons campaign played by the original members of id Software, which Romero cofounded.

The kanji above should actually be read as daito or okatana . To combine the Chinese reading of the first kanji, dai with the Japanese reading of the second kanji, katana is quite strange.

= See also =

= External links =

== News articles ==