The Monkey Stone Manifesto
Ion Storm studios to part ways?
Rumours have been circulating for the last few weeks that Ion Storm Dallas and British-based publisher Eidos were about to part ways, with Tom Hall's role-playing game Anachronox allegedly the last game to emerge from the studio. Just last week Mike McGarvey of Eidos told trade magazine MCV that "I'm sure those guys will be making games in the future, but whether or not it's with us remains to be seen". Hardly a ringing endorsement of the Texan company, which has been haemorrhaging money for the last five years without producing a single hit so far.
Today reports have emerged that Ion Storm's more successful Austin studio may be breaking away from Romero's Dallas headquarters, with the latest issue of PC Gamer in the USA apparently quoting Warren Spector as saying that "it was time to move on". While this probably had something to do with the problems that the Dallas studio has been facing, Spector put the decision down to creative differences. "We had a way of thinking, and we had a type of game we wanted [to make]. The Ion Storm Dallas office was pretty heavily focused on that Dallas shooter community. It just started feeling not like a family."
Ion Storm Austin will apparently be renamed Manifesto Games as part of the move, and the Dallas studio is also rumoured to be getting a new title. This would make sense if Eidos are planning to end their relationship with the Dallas studio, as our understanding is that they now own the Ion Storm name. And according to a report on VoodooExtreme today, John Romero has recently registered the URL MonkeyStone.com, giving the name of his organisation as "Monkeystone Games" in the application. We only have one question. Why Monkeystone?!?