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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
"I wanted to elevate shooters," he says. "Up until then they had been pretty mindless." He decided to put something even more radical than a rocket launcher into his game: a story. In Daikatana, the player becomes Hiro Miyamoto, a Japanese biochemical student in 25th century Kyoto who must save the world from Kage Mishima, an evil scientist who has stolen the daikatana (Japanese for "big sword"), a magical blade invented by Hiro's ancestors. Using the sword's time-traveling powers, Kage is altering history for his own corrupt ends, such as hijacking the cure for an AIDS-like disease. Faced with Hiro's threat, Kage sends the young warrior on a wild, time-traveling goose chase around Kyoto, ancient Greece, Dark Ages Norway and post-apocalyptic San Francisco.
For added drama, Hiro is teamed with two sidekicks, the "Shaft"-like Superfly Johnson and the beautiful, brainy Mikiko. In other shooters, players can be completely self-absorbed, only worrying about their own hide getting incinerated by a rocket launcher. But in Daikatana, a gamer must command and protect his artificially intelligent sidekicks. And thus comes the second radical notion in the game, empathy. If Superfly or Mikiko dies, Hiro dies too.
From the get-go, Daikatana was, to say the least, ambitious. Every polygon of these grandiose worlds would have to be coded from scratch, to interact seamlessly with the characters and the action. In addition to the complex nuances of the A.I. bots, the game -- with its 100 unique levels and monsters spread throughout -- had to be built, essentially, as four different games.
Romero, an admitted perfectionist, had spent years making games almost completely on his own. But for Daikatana, there was no way humanly possible to do everything himself, as he would have preferred. Instead, he would have to deal with the most complicated software of all, people. And as he soon learned, he says, "the number one rule in gaming is [that] people break."
The first 14 hours are always the easiest
"Aaaaarrggggggggh!" Shawn Green screams as he thrashes his computer keyboard against the ground. It's midnight in the coders cove of Ion Storm and the cubes are as dark as the city below outside. Green, a stocky, long-haired programmer in a paunchy black T-shirt, hunches like an ape at the beginning of "2001" and whacks keys across the floor like loose teeth.
A skinny programmer stretches his neck out of a nearby cube to observe the tantrum, then nonchalantly returns to his work. Green brushes the hair from his face as a smile creeps across it. "Nothing like a little stress relief," he says, tossing the battered keyboard down the hall.
Green, the 28-year-old lead coder on Daikatana and a veteran of id Software, is 14 hours into one more 18-hour day. In a few minutes, he'll take his first and only break, heading off to an abandoned abortion clinic to practice with his doom-metal band, Last Chapter. After staring at lines of code all day and sucking down half a case of Mountain Dew, Green is always looking for new ways to blow off the steam and caffeine. "John [Romero] and I have talked about making a life-size porcelain doll that holds a baseball bat," Green tells me. "You know," he adds, snickering, "it holds its own demise."
So, it could be said, do he and Daikatana's other coders, artists, level designers, beta testers and producers. Everyone teeters on the brink of self-destruction during crunch mode, the ruthless death schedule that comes during these final months of production. Creating this elaborate virtual world is inherently deep, with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and, worse, the potentially cataclysmic ripple effect of a bug. The sheer relentlessness of crunch mode, Romero insists, is the only way to make sure everything gets covered.
To hack it, survivors like Green have transformed crunch into their high-tech frat's equivalent of hazing -- the upperclassmen being the machines, and the pledges, the humans who serve them. Crunch is the quintessential test of stamina, a test that can take on an almost euphoric masochism. Brian Eiserloh, a bushy, 29-year-old coder who goes by the nickname Squirrel, set the office record for spending 85 out of 90 days without going home. "You can get an amazing amount of work done," he enthuses via e-mail. "I thrive under [short bursts] of pressure." The thing is, Daikatana turned out to be a long burst.
