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[kupoartist]

Responsible for some of gaming's most ambitious titles, Eidos owned Ion Storm has finally bit the dust. After loosing high profile studio figure-heads, Warren Spector and Harvey Smith, Ion Storm wasn't known to be working on any projects and have fallen afoul of Eidos employment cuts - many would argue, the soul of the developer was long gone anyway.

The history of Ion Storm is an interesting and varied one. Founded in 1996 by ex iD Software guys Tom Hall and John Romero, it was famous for pissing money down the crapper trying to prove that game developers could live it up like Rock Stars in their Dallas penthouse. When they actually put their minds to developing games, Ion Storm released an awful Strategy game called Dominion which was distinctly unsuccessful. All the hype centered on one title: Daikatana, Jon Romero's new FPS game to end all FPS games. After years of delays and escalating hype, Daikatana finally got released and recieved an inevitable drumming.

Meanwhile, the "quiet" arm of Ion Storm in Austin was working away on something truely special. If Ion Storm is remembered for one game, it'll be Deus Ex, the FPS RPG that completely rocked the world in the year 2000. Ultimately, the last Ion Storm Dallas title came out and that arm, the one that everyone had been watching whilst the real talent ran away with the game, died a messy death.Anachronox defied the Ion Storm Dallas convention by actually being quite good, but was instantly forgotten anyway.

The final years of the newly defined Ion Storm looked promising: after the success of Deus Ex, a sequel was put into the works and upon the death of Looking Glass Studios, the rights to the Thief games passed to Ion Storm. Despite this promise, the resulting games (Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows) Polarised opinion and proved to be a minimal success on both PC and X-Box. I can only speak for the PC versions, but the sense that our version was being limited by the X-Box hardware was one of the main reasons behind the negative opinion for these titles. That and Deus Ex 2 just inately sucks.

So there you have it. 1 Absolute classic game, 2 "Marmite" games, 1 "Pretty Good" game and 2 Crappy ones. Ladies and Gentlemen - Ion Storm. You'll be missed by everyone who knows that MJ12 is a secret organisation and not a postcode.

Source

[Chara]

The future of console gaming is going to be nothing but EA, lucasarts, and the first party developers. Well, at least american developers, that is. All games form japan will be capcoanienix.

[Infernal Mass]

yea, when Warren Spector left I kinda saw this coming. I hope there's no bad ties between Spector and Eidos and that he decides to still help on the new tomb raider.