ION Dallas Closes

Not so much Doom news, but it is being reported everywhere that ION Storm appears to have officially closed down and everyone, including founders John Romero and Tom Hall, have been laid off. Both Romero and Hall were instrumental in making Doom what it is, and it always sucks to see this sort of thing happen. Best of luck to them both, as well as everyone else from ION Dallas.

"Both Tom and Hall"... hah! :P

It's sad to know that, especially considering that Anox seemed to be a rather good game. God damn you, Romero.

who's going to be bugfixing Anox?

That's going to be rather important if I'm ever going to pick up a copy of Anox ...

Altho i dont own anachronox i have thos to say : Well in the good old days when maybe less money was hanging on the business i remember game creators continuing support to theyr baby even if it had absolutely no profit in it and had to be unofficial. But maybe since this business has become such a megabuck business this state of mind has been corrupted but we may hope that old schoolers such as Romero would provide support for the game, after all Romero recently got back to participating in the doom community...(probly cos now Ion Storm Dallas dosnt operate anymore hes got time on his hands to do this sorta suff :P )

Well, that depends on the company. Blizzard for example brings out patches for a long time, fixing the tiniest bugs. I guess that's why they are so successful in what they are doing.

If this means that there's no threat of Daikatana 2 then the gaming world is a better place.

You'd never know that by checking out the battle.net forums =(

Ah! Ling breaks Arioch's record for most links in a news update. Or at least the most links in a row anyway =).

(Carmack) ...and what makes you think you can work for us, Mr... um...
(Romero) Jomero. Ron Jomero.
(Carmack) Uh-huh. I know it's you, John; you can take off the fake beard.
(Romero) No, it's not me... D'OH!!

Too bad Id isn't hiring anymore, that would be interesting though..

I wouldn't worry about fixing Anachronox - two missing developers isn't going to be much of a problem.

BTW - For those of you who haven't tried out Anachronox yet, do yourself a favour and download the demo.

-Dan

CURSES!!! 16999999 visitor on ZD and I missed the print screen button! DAMN IT TO THE BLOODY BOWELS OF HELL!!!

argh...

rant over :D

Are they going to start offering stuff from the ZD store if you're the x millionth visitor now?

I think thats what SwampGas is going to do, but who knows

16999999.. so close...

ARRGH!!!

I DL'd the Anachronox demo and DAMN!

92 megs in 10 mins. (I love my Cable Modem!)

I think they redeemed themselves with this masterpiece.

I should grab it tomarrow, after the SpeedMapping exercise.

Ling, there will be another one right? Right?

They closed down the Ion Storm Dallas offices too.

I wonder if Nintendo programmers ever sit at work muttering "God, I wish we could release patches for our games like them slack old PC developers. We just get it right first time!"

Improving performance in a patch is one thing but ironing out bugs???
What the hell happened to QA and testing etc.

You think console games are without bugs the first time around? Even without show stopping bugs?

lol

-Dan

OPENSOURCE ANOX!!

Dan: well it's far more easy to iron out bugs with consoles. Since they don't come with as many configurations as there are ussers.

I've played a million and one console games and those that are really worth playing are tight. Some are even polished so well they make me laugh out loud at the over hyped nonsense coming out of the Dallas scene.

Anachronox?

lol

-Wilf

Good riddance for Romero.
It's been known in the industry (and publically it seems) that for ages he's been an incredible fool.
Daikatana was shite, and deservedly so.
Romero's business plan was:
1) Get lots of investment on my name
2) Claim to be creating a game that is far beyond my ability to create
3) Hide
Well, they caught up with him eventually. The only question was why wasn't the company shut up before Diakatana was ever released, since it was so obviously a money pit that would never work. The figures didn't add up right from the beginning.
Anyway, let's hope he and others learn the lesson that being famous simply isn't enough.

Barry
gerbil@theburrow.co.uk

Romero is the only one of the doom designers who still plays Doom in any publicly-known capacity. He was the only one who showed up for the CPL Doom2 tournament in Dallas, and he was there for it last year as well. I even seem to remember at least one of ID's people saying, back when Quake1 (the TOTAL piece of shit) came out, "Doom is dead." I donno why so many people seem to be rejoicing whenever Romero has apparrent problems. He's a fellow doomer. It doesent too much matter if people didn't like the games his new company made, Doom-enthusiast people shouldn't be beating him up the way i have seen in this thread.

--BahdKo

I'm with Bahdko-