DAIKATANA Pre-Alpha: Impressive Start

[FighterForJustice]

I've been studying some of the alpha/beta gameplay videos and trailers of games from the late '90s (including our favorite QTest1, which I went on to play as well).

Anyway, came across the pre-alpha gameplay video of DAIKATANA. Being intrigued by this pre-alpha, I played the it myself.

Having been somewhat put of by the retail version of DAIKATANA, I am pretty impressed by what John Romero and team originally set out to do with the game with the Quake 1 engine.

It felt like the first Quake engine, with jerky model movements, but with much more color. It also had some of id's trademark dark humor, such as the meat processing unit in the prison's basement, used to grind its poor Japanese prisoners in.

I was disappointed that the pre-alpha didn't have a samurai sword (i.e. katana) to start with, since I would have liked to see how the sword would have worked in the Quake engine. It would have felt like the Quake equivalent of SHADOW WARRIOR, or JEDI KNIGHT. (Or a Quake axe with just more slicing power).

I do wonder, being impressed by the pre-Alpha, if it possible for team to develop a DAIKATANA mod for Quake 1 inspired by the pre-Alpha, with original art of course. Would John Romero permit such a project?

[Grim Warlock]

Quake wasn't going to be like Daikatana, it was going to be medieval/fantasy RPG game.

[Disco]

Daikatana was suppose to make us john romero's bitches.

[FighterForJustice]

What are you talking about, Christopher Murphey? I didn't say that Quake was going to be like Daikatana. Quake obviously preceded Daikatana. I was saying that Daikatana, in its earliest development stages, originally used the Quake 1 engine. It ended up using the Quake II engine instead, of course.

I know that Quake was originally going to a be a medieval/fantasy RPG. I didn't anything about Quake 1's development history in my topic. Sorry if I caused any confusion.

Now you've mentioned it, I was going to ask Quake One if anyone did consider developing a mod based upon the original RPG concept for Quake. It would be Quake meets The Legend of Zelda (with a hammer instead of sword, of course.) Such a mod would require creative story writing, too.
I thought it would be cool if the events of the Quake RPG preceded what would happen in the main Quake. This would lead to another mod based upon the Quake beta as well.

[golden_boy]

There is Fantasy Quake, which is a pretty cool mod.

As for remaking Daikatana in Quake 1, sure, if some poor souls think it a worthwhile project, why not.

Not me, though. No more remakes :-P

John Romero? Ask him if he'll permit it. I don't know who owns Daikatana these days though.

Be sure to include a bitch ad. Although it does get old. A game killed by shitty PR, yay.

[Grim Warlock]

No one knows what Quake was going to be, and your logic is incorrect. When they finally developed the Quake engine they were broken and couldn't be bothered making the game, so they made it a FPS instead. I'm pretty sure there was never a RPG version of Quake, it was going to be made but it never was. John Romero said to me they developed Quake: The Fight For Justice but they never released it. And why would you bother porting Daikatana to a weaker (Quake) engine?

[FighterForJustice]

I was not suggesting a port. Just a pre-alpha DAIKATANA styled mod, with its own levels. The idea is just for hypothetical fun. I like to speculate on the possibilities about such a project. My interest in the weaker Quake 1 engine is out of retro-nostalgic interest, and I'm impressed by what many modders have done with the Quake 1 engine, historically and recently.

I wasn't using any logic in regards to the original Quake 1 concept. I was just referring to by memory what the game was supposed to be like from the advertisment at the end of Commander Keen, and from what I learned from John Romero's interview at Quake Expo.

Thanks for the additional information about Quake's devolopment history, Murphy. I do find it strange that Romero told you that id developed Quake: The Fight For Justice, but never released it. I thought it was never completed, or that not enough work was put into it, so they created a Doom-styled game instead.

If a mod were created based upon the original concept for Quake, it would use Commander Keen announcement for The Fight For Justice's story and gameplay as a starting point, and use the modder's imagination to fill in the rest of the work.

Maybe I could create a variation of the "bitch" add for the proposed mod, golden_boy, for humorous effect. I wouldn't want to do it, since the "bitch" adds were very pompous. John Romero said that he never wanted to say that to anyone, and that he wished that he didn't allow his publicity person to create that ad.

[Grim Warlock]

"The concept of the original Quake: Fight for Justice we developed in Jan 1991 and the actual game Quake released in 1996 have nothing in common at all.

The 1991 version was a top-down RPG that used the Keen1 engine (we had just released our first id game, Commander Keen 1. Today is the 20th anniversary).

The dragon was dropped from the Quake design as we got closer to the game getting done and no code was written to support the dragon. Nor were the levels built to be able to handle such a huge creature."

[MH]

They developed the concept of the game, not the game itself, and back in 91 it was really not much more than some teaser text about a planned upcoming title. This is common knowledge.

Quote from Romero on the 3D Realms board to back this up: The Fight For Justice - 3D Realms Forums

We actually started working on it immediately after finishing Keen1-3, but abandoned the project because the technology of the time couldn't help us realize the vision of what Quake was all about.

Eidos own Daikatana, and they would almost certainly not be hip to a remake. And anyway, I'd say that bugging them to release the original Tomb Raider source code should have a higher priority if one was going to bug them about anything.

In a way it's a shame about what happened with Daikatana. I thought it was quite a fun game, with an interesting concept behind it, and it definitely deserved a better reception than it got. I can understand how it ended up the way it did; Romero definitely wanted to prove his concept right, and may have still been smarting about the way Quake turned out. On balance it was probably two or three years ahead of it's time, and if ION had gone with the original "Quake TC" concept, saving the really ambitious stuff for a hypothetical Daikatana II, things may have turned out differently.

But we'll never know...

[Grim Warlock]

Why did he say "The 1991 version was a top-down RPG that used the Keen1 engine" then?

[golden_boy]

mh: or even a TR style Quake mod !

[MH]

Why did he say "The 1991 version was a top-down RPG that used the Keen1 engine" then?

You'd want to ask Romero that; the fact that I'm not the man himself means that I could only guess. Possible reasons might be misremembering, talking about the concept (i.e. "that used the Keen 1 engine" being shorthand for "that was intended to use the Keen 1 engine") or any one of a number of other things.

But what it does boil down to is that there is plenty of documented evidence that Q:TFFJ was never actually made, in various sources such as the forum post I quoted, the Masters of Doom book, the QExpo interview ("in 1990 we made mention of a game called "Quake: The Fight For Justice" that we were going to make. We did some prototyping and decided that it just wasn't time to make that game - tech needed to advance") and so on.