Ah, Daikatana. Every now and then you rear your ugly head.
I get a sort of sadistic pleasure every time someone unearths this travesty of a game. A good friend of mine was a programmer on the Daikatana team. On the original engine, that is. When he left to pursue other things they threw out all his code. The new code is what the public saw in all its glory. Whenever this topic gets dug up, some evil part of me makes sure my friend sees it. It happens every few years.
Romero himself is still fairly active. I know because Facebook has decided to make sure I see everything the friends of my friends are up to and there seems to be no way to stop it other than leaving Facebook. But, like a battered wife, I stick around and watch the show. I don't think this game ever really dented his ego much. If it did, he hides it. Honestly, I find it hard to be too cynical about him. Daikatana was about as glorious a fuckup as can be had, but it didn't destroy the guy. As an indie developer, such a crippling failure would have devastated me. Then again, Daikatana was just a badly made game. It wasn't like he worked on Duke Nukem Forever. I would probably have committed suicide long ago if I had made something that tasteless.