> One of my favorite non-fiction books is Masters of Doom.

Loved this book as well. Convinced me more than anything to stay out of game dev. It was also cool getting the inside story on why Ion Storm went belly up. I have huge respect for the games that the Austin office put out and IMO Warren Spector is one of the top game designers of our generation. But it seems like the Daikatana flop was one of those rare career ending failures. It took down the Dallas office which was the main HQ, left a black mark on many people's careers and was also ill timed with the popping of the Dot Com Bubble. Funding for new, risky ideas was essentially gone in the aftermath.

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tombert 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I do find it amusing, since I really don't think Daikatana is that bad. It's not great, but at least with the PC version I think there's some fun to be had. It was just way over-budget and overhyped with an extremely questionable marketing campaign. Also, the GBC version is a legitimately pretty decent game.

Deus Ex is of course much better, but to be fair most games fall short of Deus Ex.

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lobf 38 minutes ago | parent [-]

I think the "John Romero is about to make you his bitch" campaign in particular was an incredibly bad call, especially in the "gay panic" era, and made people want to see it fail.

Not that it needed any help, but I think that contributed to the glee around the spectacular crash-and-burn.

	▲	tombert 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, and I think they made it seem like it was going to be this revolutionary FPS, when it was basically a "B average" one. If you go in with basically no expectations to the PC version, I actually do think it can be a bit fun. It has a late-90s/early-2000's charm that I still find appealing. The N64 version is irredeemably bad, but in 2026 I don't really see any reason to play the N64 version. Agreed that the "John Romero is about to make you his bitch" was a pretty questionable marketing strategy. I guess it did get peoples' attention, but I don't think it was the attention that they wanted.