Daikatana

John Romero's Daikatana, better known as simply Daikatana, is a 2000 first-person shooter action role-playing game developed by Ion Storm and published by Eidos Interactive for Windows. A port to the Nintendo 64 was released the same year by Kemco. Players control a swordsmaster who travels through various time periods using the eponymous Daikatana, a powerful sword tied to the fate of the world.

Daikatana was directed by Ion Storm co-founder John Romero, a co-developer of the influential first-person shooters Wolfenstein 3D (1992), Doom (1993), and Quake (1996). Announced in 1997 as Romero's first game after leaving id Software, it underwent a troubled development that saw a change in its engine, release date delays, and the departure of several staff members. The protracted development, combined with promotion that focused on Romero's involvement over the game itself, resulted in negative publicity for Daikatana prior to its release.

Released in May 2000, Daikatana received generally negative reviews for its outdated graphics, gameplay, repetitive sound effects, and poor artificial intelligence. It also sold only 40,351 copies, becoming one of the biggest major commercial failures of the video game industry. Due to the negative response, a separate version for the Game Boy Color did not receive a North American release; it was released in Europe and Japan to a more positive reception.

Gameplay

thumb|left|Gameplay of Daikatana

Daikatana is composed of 24 levels (18 in the console version) divided into four episodes, with a varying number of levels per episode. Each episode represents a different location and time period: Japan in 2455 AD, ancient Greece in 1200 BC, the Dark Ages in Norway in 560 AD, and near-future San Francisco in 2030 AD.

One element that Daikatana stressed was the important role of Hiro Miyamoto's two sidekicks, Mikiko Ebihara and Superfly Johnson. The death of either sidekick resulted in failing the level, and their assistance was required to complete certain puzzles. Due to poor AI implementation, the sidekicks, who were one of the game's selling points, became a focus of criticism. Tabs displaying the status of each sidekick are displayed on either side of the player's screen. When a sidekick moves too far away from the player their tab disappears. The player is also able to give the sidekicks commands such as Stay and Follow.

As the player progresses through the game they are able to level various attributes to improve their skills. These attributes are Power, Attack, Speed, Acro and Vitality. a company founded by Romero, Tom Hall, Bob Wright, Mike Wilson, Todd Porter, and Jerry O'Flaherty. Wilson, the CEO, was removed in November 1997, after using $30,000 in company funds to buy a BMW. Wright was removed by Porter and O'Flaherty in May 1998. Over 50 Ion Storm employees left after Wright's removal. Porter and O'Flaherty were fired in 1999, with rumors being that Romero was angry at Porter's interference in Daikatana.

The aim was for the company to create games that catered to their creative tastes without excessive publisher interference, which had constrained both Romero and Hall too much in the past. Daikatana was part of an initial three-game contract made between Ion Storm and expanding publisher Eidos Interactive; and the third title to be conceived at Ion Storm after Anachronox and what would become Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3.

Two main influences for Daikatana were Chrono Trigger and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, of which Romero was a fan. He implemented the sidekick feature from the former and the mighty sword from the latter. For the sidekicks, Romero wanted Mikiko and Superfly to do everything the player does in the game. Using 2001's Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon as another reference, he wanted the sidekicks to do more than what the AI squads could do, like jumping, running, fighting and solving puzzles (the AI squads are locked to the ground and cannot jump). Romero later regretted this decision, as he found out that programming this feature was very difficult because the sidekicks ended up being buggy and unresponsive.

In 1997, Romero compared Quake seven weapons and 10 monsters across the game with 150 polygons to Daikatana 35 weapons and 16 monsters per episode with 500 polygons. John Carmack stated that a game of that size could not be completed by its December release date. Romero's design document for the game was 400 pages long. Kee Kimbrell, the co-creator of DWANGO, was the lead programmer.

The core concept was to do something different with shooter mechanics several times within the same game. The music was composed by a team which included Will Loconto. Christian Divine created the character Superfly Johnson, originally named Super Williams in honor of Super Fly and Jim Kelly's character from Enter the Dragon. He was originally of French descent with "his name taken from the few cultural documents left in the apocalyptic future" and his "character arc would be finding out his real identity at the end". Due to the delays, development of the game ran parallel to Anachronox, Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3, and eventually Deus Ex. Both Quake II and Quake III Arena came out before Daikatana.

Something that further impacted production was the departure of around twenty staff members from the team, who either left Ion Storm or transferred to the Austin studio. According to Divine, the growing negative press surrounding the company had a further detrimental effect on development. Some of the backlash eventually led to his own departure for Ion Storm's Austin studio to work on Deus Ex. Almost the entire team working on Daikatana left to join Gathering of Developers by 1999. 17 people, one-fifth of Ion Storm's employees, left in early 1999, and Corrinne Yu, director of technology, left for 3D Realms. Only two staff members remained on the game for the entirety of its production. In a later interview, Romero admitted there were many faults with the game at release, blaming the development culture and management clashes at Ion Storm, in addition to staff departures causing much of the work to be scrapped and begun over again. A sequel, using the Unreal Engine 1, was considered.

Promotion and release

thumb|left|The controversial advertisement for Daikatana

Daikatana was revealed in 1997, forming part of the opening publicity for Ion Storm. Public, journalistic and commercial confidence in the project was weakened by the repeated delays to its release date. In a 2008 blog post, Romero attributed the marketing tactic to Wilson, prompting a hostile exchange of public messages between the two. Romero told Retro Gamer that Sasha Shor designed the game's packaging and the ad.

Daikatana was demoed at the 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo. The demo ran at a very low 12 frames per second, A tie-in comic book was drawn by Marc Silvestri and released by Top Cow for Prima Games' Daikatana: Prima's Official Strategy Guide. The Nintendo 64 version was first released as a Blockbuster rental exclusive by Kemco in August 2000. It was later released for retail on November 26, 2000.

Daikatana received a 44 megabyte patch and its final patch, version 1.2, was released on September 29, 2000. Following the release of Daikatana and Anachronox, Ion Storm Austin decided to close the Dallas branch office in July 2001.

Reception

Sales

Ion Storm's 1996 business plan projected that Daikatana would sell around 175,000 copies. According to American market research company PC Data, a week after its release, the game ranked number ten on their charts from the week of May 28 to June 3. The computer version of Daikatana sold 8,190 copies in the United States by July 21, which drew revenues of $271,982. Mark Asher of CNET Gamecenter called this performance "a disaster". According to PC Data, the game's domestic sales reached 40,351 units through September 2000.<!--It sold 25,291 copies in the United States by November 2000, according to PC Data.-->

Reviews

Jeff Lundrigan reviewed the PC version of the game for Next Generation, rating it two stars out of five, and stated that "This isn't the worst game you'll ever play, but there's precious little fun either. Two years out of its time, Daikatana is notable mostly for its mediocrity." Entertainment Weekly gave it a "D", calling the game a "disaster" on the scale of the box-office bomb Waterworld. PC Zone review criticized the first episode as the worst part of the game and that "Romero's reputation is based on the fact that he is the daddy of game design. Daikatana must be his illegitimate child". The second level in Greece was praised by Robert Coffey in Computer Gaming World as the game's best level.

Computer Gaming World named it the worst game of 2000. It was listed as the worst game of the year by Maximum PC technical editor Will Smith and associate editor Geoff Visgilio.

The Nintendo 64 version received "unfavorable" reviews, according to the review aggregation website GameRankings.

Retrospective analysis

Since its release, the game has been called one of the worst video games of all time. GameTrailers ranked the game as the second-biggest gaming disappointment of the 2000s, citing the game's terrible AI, pushed-back release dates, controversial magazine ad, and internal drama as "the embodiment of game's industry hubris."

The game critic Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, on a retrospective episode of Zero Punctuation, also citing the development delays and the magazine ad, named Daikatana "one of the most notorious disappointments in the entire history of first-person shooters", comparing the game to Duke Nukem Forever.

In 2010, Romero said that despite its shaky development and being considered one of the worst games of all time, Daikatana was "more fun to make than Quake" due to the lack of creative interference.

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Daikatana v1.3 (also referred to as the "1.3 patch") is an unofficial patch project started by modder and IT professional Frank Sapone and other modders.

The project aims to fix various issues the game was criticized for and make general improvements:

• Bug fixes
• Faster loading times with an option to disable the sound effect
• Graphical fidelity
• HD textures
• Glowmaps
• Ability to play the game on macOS (including systems with Apple silicon chipsets), Linux, and FreeBSD

Jack Pooley of WhatCulture called it a "tectonic improvement" over the vanilla game.

Game Boy Color version

The Game Boy Color version of Daikatana was released in Europe and Japan; publisher Kemco decided against the North American release due to the poor reputation of the Daikatana brand. The Japanese version was also only made available as a download for the Nintendo Power peripheral. This version's gameplay differs greatly from the N64 and PC versions: at Romero's request, the title was adapted to the platform as a top-down dungeon crawler, in the style of early Zelda games such as the NES original and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. In 2004, Romero released the ROM images for the Game Boy Color game on his website, for use with emulators. Frank Provo for GameSpot gave the game a seven out of ten.