TITLE
How Kindness Saved the Cult Hit ‘Anachronox’ from the Wreck of Ion Storm
AUTHOR
Duncan Fyfe
PUBLICATION
Waypoint: Games By Vice
YEAR
2021
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
Dreams end when the dreamer wakes up. Usually. This one ends with all the dreamers getting fired.In 1996, John Romero, the co-founder of id Software and designer of hyperfast death metal shooters Doom and Quake, leveraged his success to start a company. At Ion Storm, he and Tom Hall, a friend and fellow id alum, could make whatever games they wanted, with complete creative freedom, and the resources to match their ambition. Romero, already a games celebrity from his time at id, played the swaggering frontman to the hilt and to a fault. Ion Storm’s most infamous advertisement was a one-pager that read: “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch. Suck it down.” The result was the notorious, humbling disaster of Daikatana. Romero has mellowed out in the years since, and this has a lot to do with why. Ion Storm is the story of Romero’s unmaking.
But it’s Hall’s story, and the game he made, that are more interesting. And unusual, because while Hall shared Romero’s track record and general enthusiasm, he was never given to the showmanship and provocation, nor the career opportunism or big, splashy deals. Hall was an ebullient, goofball tinkerer, with a deeply sensitive, even shy, side. The one thing he produced at Ion Storm, Anachronox, reflected that. Weird and wonderful, sincere and silly, and full of heart, Anachronox is the flawed but singular masterpiece of Hall’s long career. Of course, months before it was released, Hall and everyone who worked on it had lost their jobs.
“That’s the worst thing about Ion Storm,” says James Poole, then a producer at Ion Storm’s publisher Eidos. “Anachronox got lost in the clusterfuck.”
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Ion Storm
GAMES MENTIONED
Anachronox
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Rob Dyer
Squirrel Eiserloh
Tom Hall
Jake Hughes
Joey Liaw
Michael McHale
Lee Perry
James Poole
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive