This one requires some explanation:
- KISS: Psycho Circus - The Nightmare Child was made by Third Law Interactive, the first team that walked out of Ion Storm Dallas during the development of Daikatana.
- Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 is an RTS spinoff of 7th Level's earlier mech action game G-Nome.
- Dominion, along with 7th Level, were purchased by Ion Storm Dallas during the development of Daikatana to help fund its production. How exactly they thought an RTS game would tide people over is unknown, and to add insult to injury, the game launched a few months after Starcraft released. The game, as you might expect, was poorly received and sold fewer than 25k copies.
- Leading us to the first screenshot: in a random, crate filled warehouse in KPC's 4th episode lies this open crate filled with unsold copies of Dominion. This crate isn't normally accessible unless the player is willing to drop down from scaffolding above the warehouse floor, nabbing them a secret item in addition to this Easter Egg.
This is one of those pieces of gaming history that will likely be lost someday, but knowing that someone at Third Law clearly had a lot of fun dunking on Ion Storm Dallas fills my heart with joy. There's also a lot more going on with Dominion and its relation to Ion Storm, as well as KPC, but that's a post of its own.
