Production History
The company's first attempt was Todd Porter's Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3. Dominion was already partially completed by Todd Porter's previous employer, 7th Level, and was expected to take $50,000 and three months to complete. Instead, development continued for over a year costing hundreds of thousands. When it was finally released it received poor ratings and equally poor sales. Marketing missteps included releasing the real-time strategy game on the same day Blizzard Entertainment put out its highly-anticipated demo of StarCraft, which would become a defining game of the RTS genre.
John Romero's Daikatana was meant to be finished within seven months of the founding of Ion Storm and was to use the Quake engine. However, already behind schedule, the decision was made to port the entire game to the Quake II engine, six months into development. Likewise, Tom Hall's Anachronox was moved over to the Quake II engine. These changes brought costly delays to an already beleaguered product line.
Although Anachronox received critical acclaim for its vast storyline and characters, it too was commercially unsuccessful on its release in June 2001. Daikatana, meanwhile came out three years after its announced launch date of Christmas 1997. The game itself was not considered strong, and an aggressive advertising campaign in 1997 touting Romero's name as the reason to buy the game backfired as fans grew angry over delays.
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