Ion Storm Closes Its Doors
The legendary development studio behind the Deus Ex and Thief: Deadly Shadows series is no more.
Source: GameSpotOne of the most storied development studios in game history has shut down. Today, Eidos Interactive officials confirmed to GameSpot that the company is shuttering its Austin, Texas, studio Ion Storm.
A statement issued by the Britain-based publisher outlined the closure with typically cool corporate logic. "Eidos today announced locally that it is to consolidate down its North American internal development capabilities from two studios to one," read the statement. "This will mean the immediate closure of the Ion Storm studio in Austin, Texas, which has been focused primarily on the development of PC and Xbox games. ... This is part of [Eidos'] move to consolidate and strengthen its technical and management capabilities into a smaller number of studios which are capable of scaling up in order to meet the competitive challenges that lie ahead, particularly in anticipation of next-generation technologies and platforms."
However, the brief statement was hardly a fitting epitaph for Ion Storm, which has seen some of gaming's most celebrated--and controversial--talent walk through its doors. The company was founded in 1996 by Doom cocreators John Romero and Tom Hall after the pair exited id Software. Shortly thereafter, the studio was bought outright by Eidos. Funded by Eidos and located in a Dallas penthouse, Ion Storm labored for the next three years developing and hyping the genre-bending PC game Daikatana. When it was finally released in 2000, the game received almost universally awful reviews. Its failure spurred Hall and Romero's departures, as well as the closure of Ion Storm Dallas in 2001.
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Soon all we're going to have left is EA & Microsoft producing games for XBox & PC.