John Romero's Daikatana

Trivia

In April 2007, a fan team released Daikatana Deathmatch (DKDM), a multiplayer-only modification stripping the game from all the single player parts to reduce the file size for players who only want the multiplayer part. It still requires a full copy of the game to play. The link can be found in the related links section.

Contributed by Sciere (119770) on May 01, 2007.

Daikatana sold 200,000 copies and had budget of over $10 million.

Game has a cooperative two player mode. You can play through the story with your friend.

The story of the game's development and Ion Storm in general is as epic and profound as anything in the game. Check the related links for The Story of Daikatana

The reason for the long development cycle was because of the switch to the Quake II engine. Romero decided to switch because of its colored lighting, among other graphical goodies, but when he finally received the source code, it was nothing like he pictured.

As the sounds and dialog are not encrypted, one creative mixer was able to rearrange the dialog, add a little fake stuff here and there, add some bump-and-grind music, and came up with a long MP3 that sounds as if the two guys in the game were, uh... engaging the female sidekick. It's absolutely hilarious. Computer Gaming World called it the ONLY redeeming feature of Daikatana, though that sounds a little harsh.

The characters' sound files used in this game are not encrypted in any way. Instead, they're ordinary mp3 files found in the data/sounds/voices folder of your daikatana directory.

There's quite a bit of unused dialogue in there which never made it into the full game. It seems your enemies and your two sidekicks were supposed to have more ambiant dialogue (ie combat taunts, waiting sounds, etc.) than what was eventually used.

There's an interesting musical "easter egg" in this game. In the lobby of the Mishima Funeral Home/Crematorium, there's some solemn funeral-type music playing. If you crank up the volume on your speakers, you'll realize that this is really a slowed down version of the famous e1m1 music from Doom.

Long before Daikatana was released, an ad for it was was run in several magazines stating "John Romero's Gonna Make You His Bitch." Needless to say this upset quite a few folks.

Daikatana was in development for 3 years, exactly.

There's 4 Dopefish hidden in the game, 1 per time period.