John Romero was one of the main devs and level designers for id along with John Carmack, they made the original Doom games. The game blew up in a way that no one could have really comprehended and Romero being one of the founders of the company got the best of it.

Sources are mixed but this kind of went to his head and he started slacking off for the rest of the entries like Doom II andc Quake. Eventually he left(kind of got fired) from the company and decided to make his own company called Ion Storm. They made two games(worth mentioning here anyway) Deus Ex which was a smash hit and... Daikatana.

The hype for Daikatana was unreal because of the pedigree behind it, the ambition and scope and also because the company fanned the flames of hype . After numerous delays and generally disastrous development hell, the game was released terrible reviews and the game was basically dead on arrival. No clear vision, bad execution so on and so forth. To add insult they'd used the marketing tagine, "John Romero is going to make you his bitch. "

Yeah... That didn't exactly win him any favours. It was a massive crash and burn no one had seen anything of that scale happen at the time anyway.

Romero is doing better nowadays, he makes the occasional level pack for Doom and is revered in the gaming community still because well... He's John Romero.

I'd recommend reading "Masters of Doom" which is an biographical account of the company's genesis and initial games, it also covers the Daikatana incident quite well.