Biggest. Game. Disasters. Ever?

How exciting to see something you toiled on reduced to a top Yahoo story on big budget video game flops:

Daikatana: Once upon a time, John Romero could do no wrong. Flushed with his success at Id Software, where he was instrumental in designing classics like Doom and Quake, he left to form his own studio, Ion Storm, and develop a new first-person shooter. What followed was an intricate and marvelous tale of pride, massive dot-com spending excess, colossal hype, atrociously bad ads, and, once the game was finally released, terrible reviews. Romero’s studio collapsed soon after, and with it went most of Romero’s once-proud reputation. He reportedly claimed Daikatana actually sold enough copies to recoup its vast costs, but regardless of whether that’s true it’ll always be remembered as the game that brought down Ion Storm.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. I was fortunate enough to get my version, “A Hardcore Elegy For Ion Storm” on Salon.com in 2002. I was pleased that of the over 400 emails I received on my essay, 98 percent were supportive or at least inclined to understand the distance between idea and execution. And all that implies. I wish the game had ruled all, but I can’t debate what people didn’t like about DAIKATANA. They played, they judged. Or some did. It was still one of the greatest experiences in my life. Like Marian Gold sang in “Feathers & Tar,” my Ion Storm theme song: “Nobody needs to tell me that this ain’t the end of the world/It’s just one of those crazy moments of the late, late 20th century…”