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Last Notes

2026-10-24 03:05:54 GMT

An Ion Storm!, Part 2: The Return to Ground Level
Stevie Case and John Romero early in their courtship.
This article tells part of the story of John Romero.
Note that there is a sexually suggestive image below that may be Not Safe For Work!
In the badlands of what used to be Texas, rumor has it that John Romero has thrown himself out the window of Ion Storm’s penthouse offices. Apparently Romero had finally finished Daikatana, only to have the Y2K bug destroy the gaming rigs of the world mere seconds later, thus rendering the last three years of Romero’s life terribly, terribly moot.
— Computer Gaming World, January 2000 issue
When Stevana “Stevie” Case arrived for her freshman year at the University of Nebraska in 1996, her conception of digital games was limited to the likes of Super Mario Bros. The daughter of a science professor, she had grown up in Kansas in comfortable middle-class surroundings, a precocious overachiever who told her family early on that her goal in life was to become the first female president of the United States. As her first steps toward that position, at age seventeen she had unsuccessfully run for the Kansas state legislature and successfully run for president of her high-school student body, in which capacity she had shaken hands with Bill Clinton. Now, she intended to become a lawyer as her next steppingstone to Clinton’s current office. She was already familiar with the inside of a courtroom, because she and her family had sued her school in federal court for banning Annie on My Mind, a young-adult novel about a lesbian relationship, from its library. They had won the suit, forcing the school to reimburse their costs and, most importantly, return the book to the library shelves. Prim and articulate, Stevie Case gave every sign of being destined for a bright future in the public sphere.
But then, almost as soon as she arrived at university, some of the young men who lived in her dorm complex showed her DOOM and Quake. She was immediately transfixed. Hyper-competitive ever since she had muscled her way onto a boys’ T-ball team when she was barely out of preschool, she adored the deathmatch ethos: “It was really fast, and you felt like you were flying through that world. And then when you added the ability to compete and beat other people, it just felt really addictive. I was all about the rockets and blowing shit up.” She was soon spending far more time playing Quake than studying.
These were the dawning days of what we call e-sports today, when deathmatchers were beginning to organize themselves into teams and leagues and hold tournaments to test their mettle against one another in public. This burgeoning culture of competition was clustered around the nation’s universities, whose fast local-area networks made it possible. Case won her first Quake tournament at her university in January of 1997, playing as the only woman on a team called Impulse 9. Her personal handle was KillCreek, after a Midwestern indie-rock band by the same name. She was a solid enough player, but it was her gender that truly made her stand out; her fame as “the girl who is pretty damn good at Quake” spread quickly online.
Despite his responsibilities as a founder of Ion Storm, man-of-the-people John Romero was still an active participant in the deathmatch community. “Hey, I know a girl that can kick your ass,” said a member of his circle. “No way. Never happen,” he replied.
One thing led to another, and it was arranged for the two of them to meet and do battle that spring, during a road trip to Dallas that Case and some of her friends had already planned. That semi-anonymous city of technology and finance, so often overshadowed by oil-rich Houston, music-rich Austin, and romantic San Antonio, had finally forged a proper identity for itself, among people like Case at any rate, as the wellspring of first-person shooters, home of id, 3D Realms, and now Ion Storm. For a shooter fan in 1997, making a pilgrimage there was akin to a flower-power hippie hitchhiking to San Francisco 30 years earlier. And now Stevie Case was not only going there, but going there to meet the fragger-power movement’s equivalent of Jerry Garcia.
When Romero walked into the room in his full rock-star regalia, she perceived him as a “god”: “And I’m just some person from Kansas. I had no idea if I could beat this guy or not.” As it turned out, she couldn’t, at least not on this occasion. She put up a decent fight, but Romero won fairly easily. Afterward, he posted online that “deathmatch is a man’s game and women will never fully understand it.”
Still, the novelty of a girl who could play Quake decently well was difficult for the community to resist. Encouraged to try again, Case publicly challenged Romero to a rematch, a best-of-three this time, with the loser expected to create an “online shrine” to the winner. Pressured by his own fans to pick up the gauntlet, Romero agreed to her terms. And so, once again, Case made the trek to Dallas — her ambition to become president, and with it her studies, had pretty thoroughly fallen by the wayside by now — to join battle with gaming’s biggest rock star.
She came prepared this time, having learned a bit about Romero’s play style from the previous match, more from talking to others. Her newfound confidence caught him by surprise; she won the first game handily. Romero then buckled down and took the second one, trash-talking ever more volubly and profanely as he did so, with plenty of disparaging references to her gender. The momentum seemed to be with him going into the final match. Case was thrown back on her heels in the early stages of the tiebreaker. But then…
“I’m hearing him say this running sexist commentary,” she remembers, “and it’s like something snapped in my brain. It was just this moment of, ‘Fuck this, this is not happening!’ So, I went on a rampage.” She turned the tide and won the game. As she recalls it, Romero responded ungraciously, by smashing his keyboard to pieces in a fit of pique and storming out of the room. Once he had calmed down, however, he did create the online shrine demanded by the terms of his deal with Case, even if he couldn’t resist making a backhanded excuse for the loss: “Maybe someday I will learn the secret of her master ability, or maybe next time I will, uh, eat some food before playing.”
When Case returned home from university for summer break, she told her confused parents that she was dropping out and moving to Dallas. She rented a truck, filled it with her things, and drove south to her gaming promised land.
She found herself a job there in tech-support to pay the bills, and renewed her connection to Romero through the new Cyberathlete Professional League, an organization that had him on its board of directors and routinely conducted its meetings in Ion Storm’s offices. The same species of awed, slightly clueless mainstream journalists who would soon be trooping through the Ion Storm penthouse in Chase Tower beat a path to the CPL’s door as well, trying to understand and translate what was going on there to their viewers and readers. Case made for a compelling human-interest story, being virtually the only female about the place. She began to appear with some regularity in their reporting. Her role as a mascot was valuable enough that the CPL agreed to pay her a fixed monthly stipend of $1000.
Cases’s prominence undoubtedly helped to lure more women into the scene, although they would always remain a decided minority. John Carmack was recruited to hand out the grand prize at one deathmatch tournament for women only: a signed garter belt. Such a prize encapsulated the queasy mixture of empowerment and objectification that came to characterize the female participants’ experience of this testosterone-soaked realm of endeavor.
Like her peers, Case enjoyed some of the attention that came her way thanks to her gender, but by no means all of it. Her email inbox filled up with messages from men, everything from shy inquiries into her relationship status to meticulously detailed fantasies of sex, rape and sometimes murder. She had never spared that much effort on fashion before, favoring low-maintenance bobbed hair, baggy sweaters, and jeans. But on Halloween in 1997, she went to a deathmatch party dressed as a femme fatale in a tight black dress, and was amazed and gratified by the reaction it provoked, the sense of power it gave her. Around the same time, she found herself cornered in the car of a creepy fellow who had offered her a ride, who now demanded that she show him “it” — meaning her vagina — as payment for the lift. On the spur of the moment, she did as he asked, pulling down her pants to give him a quick peek as he licked his lips in shocked silence. Again, this act seemed to turn the tables on her harasser, to give her power over him.
So, Stevie Case began to radically alter her appearance and demeanor. She had her hair styled, bought a new wardrobe, hit the gym daily, put increasingly revealing and provocative photos up on her personal website, eventually bought herself the most widely discussed breast implants in the history of gaming. “I’ll never regret having a breast augmentation,” she would say to Rolling Stone magazine in 2000. “Did people look at me differently? You’re damn right they did!”
In a sense, Case was of a piece with other unlikely suspects who found some form or other of satisfaction through sexual exhibitionism on the early Web. Whether her moves were the “correct” response to the challenges she faced, whether her newly sexualized persona reflected genuine empowerment or merely internalized misogyny, isn’t a question I can answer for you. I will only venture to say that, if a woman was going to try to turn the male gaze against itself in this way, the deathmatch scene was probably a fairly safe place to do it in comparison to many others, if only because most of its young male participants tended to be more talk than action when it came to matters sexual, not having a surfeit of experience with same in real life. (To wit: the stunned posture of Case’s harasser in the car…) They were well-primed to be cowed by, for example, an all-woman team going under the name of PMS, what with the vagaries of the female body and psyche still being such a mystery to most of them.
Case was well into her transformation in July of 1998, when she became a permanent resident of the Chase Tower penthouse suite, having been hired by Ion Storm as a tester. Shortly thereafter, she began a romantic relationship with the newly divorced John Romero. At a glance, they looked like a rock star and his supermodel girlfriend: he in his leather and chains, she in her leopard pants and high heels. The mainstream press took it as just one more layer to the human-interest story. The gaming press, just about out of patience with Romero eight months after the infamous “bitch” advertisement, was less positively disposed toward his new girlfriend.
Then came the walkout of the heart of the Daikatana team in November. Looking for loyalty in a workplace riven with rumor, innuendo, and guile, Romero promoted Case to level designer, the position she had had her eyes on all along. “I was ecstatic,” she says. “I felt like this brotherhood of designers had accepted me.”
Alas, it didn’t quite turn out that way in practice. Many in the shooter fraternity perceived Case as gaming’s Yoko Ono, an interloper whose talents lay strictly in the direction of distracting her man, stirring up dissension, and raising her own media profile. Their comments could get really, really ugly: “Just another slut that swallowed her way to fifteen minutes of fame”; “Yeah, she’s John Romero’s slut”; “She sucked about 80 dicks to get into games.”
The months that followed Case’s promotion were not easy ones for Ion Storm. On January 14, 1999, The Dallas Observer, a free local newspaper best known for concert reviews and singles ads, published an unusually lengthy piece of investigative journalism. Under the innocuous-sounding headline “Stormy Weather for Popular Computer-Game Company,” journalist Christine Biederman, a future recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, expended 7000 words detailing Ion Storm’s checkered history and what she described as its “toxic mix of prima donnas and personality cults,” sourced largely from an extensive tranche of emails smuggled out of the place by disgruntled current and former employees. It hit the world of gaming like the bombshell it was. I was playing games only occasionally at the time, but I nevertheless vividly remember stumbling upon the exposé for the first time in a copy of the Observer lying on the table in my workplace break room and reading it through in slack-jawed disbelief. The stir it caused came down to its truthiness, the way it confirmed in stark black-and-white newsprint everyone’s worst suspicions. Needless to say, copies of the article were all over the Internet within hours. Although none of the principals are much inclined to thank Biederman for writing it even today, none have refuted her reporting in any serious way either. (I relied on it extensively for the previous article in this duology.)
As if to confirm Biederman’s claims, Romero had to go to Eidos soon after the article dropped to tell them that he would not be able to deliver Daikatana to them that spring, as he had promised to do before most of his development team had walked out the previous autumn. He did his best to mollify the impatient publisher by pointing to his recent hiring of Chris Klie as the project’s new lead designer and Stephen Ash as its latest lead programmer. Both arrived from LucasArts, where they had worked together on the Western-themed shooter Outlaws and the expansion pack to Jedi Knight. Their arrival in Dallas really did bring some much-needed professionalism to the team.
But even when Romero made wise choices for his game, external events conspired to undermine him. On April 20, 1999, came a shock felt round the world, when two alienated teenage shooter fans — deathmatch handles “RebDoomer” and “Vodka” — walked into their high school in Columbine, Colorado, and shot the place up with portable arsenals that were all too real, killing 14 people and injuring another 23 before turning their weapons on themselves. For all his wild-man reputation, Romero had more natural empathy for the parents who were left grieving for their senselessly murdered offspring than did most hardcore players of his games, having brought three children into the world himself with his two wives. He still calls that April 20 “one of the darkest days of my life,” a day which forced him to confront the question of his own culpability in what had transpired. He had never shot a real gun in his life, had never imagined anything like this, had always assumed that the people with whom he deathmatched were just like him, with no interest in turning the bloody hyper-violence they saw on the monitor screen into a tragic lived reality. Now he had learned in a single searing instant that this was not uniformly correct.
From the moment the news programs broadcast footage of police officers carrying DOOM paraphernalia out of the perpetrators’ bedrooms, Columbine transformed the mainstream culture’s perception of id, Ion Storm, and all of their fellow travelers. Since the last brouhaha over violence and sex in videogames, the one initiated by Senator Joseph Lieberman in 1993, had convinced the industry to grudgingly accept a content-rating system, the subject had been treated with more bemusement than real concern even in non-gaming circles. But now, Lieberman was back, more exercised than ever, calling for “a ceasefire in the virtual arms race” with new allies by his side, such as the syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman, who claimed that the military was using DOOM to “desensitize” new recruits to the horrors of combat in advance, and President Bill Clinton, who held up some of the more macabre advertisements for “so-called first-person-shooter videogames” during a press conference. Gaming executives rushed to sanitize and/or postpone their latest hyper-violent releases.
It would all blow over in time, as th
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2026-10-17 03:19:15 GMT

This Week on The Analog Antiquarian
Opus 6: The Taming of the Shrew
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2026-10-16 03:27:41 GMT

An Ion Storm!, Part 1: The Ascent to Gamer Paradise
This article tells part of the story of John Romero.
At id, the company was rolling in millions of dollars and we just had walls. It was the whole Carmack idea of, “I don’t need anything on my walls, all I need is a table and a computer and a chair,” instead of, “Okay, we’ve got a lot of money, why not make a really bad-ass office?”
— John Romero
Romero is chaos and Carmack is order. Together they make the ultimate mix. But when you take them away from each other, what’s left?
— id Software artist Paul Steed
It was Trip Hawkins who first opened the can of worms. In 1983, to celebrate the release of Electronic Art’s first half-dozen games, he proclaimed their developers to be the rock stars of the new digital generation. The advertising campaign that followed was built around Annie Leibovitz-inspired photographs of his charges, trying a little bit too hard to look cool there in moody black and white, with Pinball Construction Set creator Bill Budge proudly showing off an actual studded leather glove. (“That’s not me really,” he would later admit; he’d bought it for dressing up as a punk rocker at a costume party.) The campaign attracted much comment, then as it still does today, but it appears not to have been all that effective in selling games. Within a few years, EA had backed off the programmers-as-rock-stars angle and was moving toward becoming the faceless corporate collective that gamers know — and in some cases hate — today.
But a dream as enticing as this one could never truly die. Ten and a half years after those airbrushed-cool EA advertisements, a group of scruffy outsiders in Dallas, Texas, unleashed DOOM upon the world. John Carmack and John Romero became the leaders of a movement that remade the culture of computer gaming over the next several years, turning it brasher, bolder, more action-oriented — and, yes, more violent. With his long hair and his penchant for black jeans and heavy-metal tee-shirts, Romero looked more at home with a studded leather glove on his fist than Bill Budge ever had. Within a year or two, he was playing DOOM in the back of a tour bus next to Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.
The reborn rock-star ethos rippled outward from id Software, Carmack and Romero’s company. Suddenly gaming was cool in a way it had never been before. Sony went all-in on rave culture and heroin-chic in promoting its new PlayStation console. David Bowie wrote songs for and lent his voice and persona to Omikron: The Nomad Soul, shortly after the aforementioned Trent Reznor had written the soundtrack for id’s Quake. A fellow named American McGee, who had worked for a few years as a level designer at id, overcame his middling CV with a rock-star-worthy name and rock-star-worthy-looks, making a transgressive shooter based on Alice in Wonderland that would have done Alice Cooper proud, with his own name up in lights there on the front of the box.
But it’s safe to say that no one in gaming did the rock-star thing bigger and better than John Romero himself. DOOM had been his brilliant, dangerous masterpiece, the game the kids all wanted to play as loudly as possible while their parents pined for the more innocent days of Pac-Man. And after DOOM… well, anyone who has ever seen one of those VH1 Behind the Music documentaries knows what has to come next. It was time for him to lose himself in decadent rock-star excess and lose the plot on his art.
Such is the conventional narrative about Ion Storm, at any rate. Is it correct, you ask? Partially — but the tale is also more complex than it might seem on the surface.
In the earliest days of Ion Storm, John Romero and Tom Hall stand outside the mock-Tudor mansion the former bought with his DOOM money.
When we last checked in with John Romero, it was the summer of 1996, and he had just been fired from id Software for some combination of artistic disagreements with John Carmack and dereliction of duty. id’s fandom on the young World Wide Web greeted the news much as their parents had that of the breakup of the Beatles. How could the partnership of opposites that had changed their lives by marrying Carmack’s cutting-edge graphics technology to Romero’s diabolically inventive level designs have fallen apart so quickly?
As it happened, Romero had already been weighing his options for months by the time the axe fell. He’d been considering starting a new studio with his old friend Tom Hall, who’d been fired from id years before for trying to inject too much story into DOOM. Now, Hall was running into much the same problem at 3D Realms, where he had been assigned to a shooter called Prey. (True to form for 3D Realms, who believed in taking their time with their games, Prey wouldn’t be completed until 2006.)
Romero’s firing changed the two men’s talk into action. Feeling the need of a partner in what lay ahead, perhaps still feeling a twinge of guilt for the way Hall’s tenure on DOOM had ended, Romero offered to pay him a salary from his own DOOM windfall while the pair of them got a new studio off the ground. Romero’s stated ethos for the studio reflected the lingering bitterness he felt toward Carmack, who had made it clear that technology — his technology — would always be the primary driver of life at id.
Design is law. What we design is what’s going to be the game. It’s not going to be that we design something and have to chop it up because the technology can’t handle it or because some programmer says we can’t do it. You design a game, you make it, and that’s what you do. That’s the law. It’s the fucking design.
It didn’t take Tom Hall long to turn in his resignation at 3D Realms.
Romero first thought to call the studio Dream Design, but soon decided that sounded too “soft,” like a “mattress brand.” Hall suggested changing it to Ion Design. Then a mutual friend named Kee Kimbrell chortled over the phone one day that “the competition better watch out, or they are going to get caught up in an ion storm!” “We’re done here,” said Romero the moment he heard those words.
Publishers courted the new studio like record labels after a hot new band. Romero and Hall made the rounds of the industry, toasted and feted at every stop: Activision, Origin, Virgin, Mindscape, Acclaim, GT Interactive. Many of these houses had been blindsided by the 3D-action revolution in games, which had sprung up from the hinterlands while they imagined that the future of interactive entertainment was for it to become one with the movies. Now, they hoped to tempt the coolest dude of all from the new scene to come in and save their bacon. Romero dined out on their desperation, unabashedly playing one publisher against another, mocking them for their cluelessness to their faces.
In the course of these journeys, Romero and Hall visited the less prominent publisher 7th Level, who were looking to diversify from educational software into games. In service of that agenda, they had already bought a fledgling studio known as Distant Thunder, founded by one Todd Porter. A nephew of the legendary country guitarist Chet Atkins, Porter was, in addition to being a pretty good guitarist himself, a former seminary student and male stripper (stage name: Preacher Boy) whose chief claim to gaming fame was a rather excruciating 1989 CRPG called Knights of Legend. (The CRPG Addict, who has far more time and patience for the lesser lights in his favorite genre than I do, spent a staggering 96 hours with it; he numbered among its flaws the fact that you need to enter “ten keyboard commands just to move one step.”) Romero and Hall got to chatting with Porter. One thing led to another, and soon they decided to offer him a job and a stake in Ion Storm. Porter agreed to join, bringing with him his art director from Distant Thunder, Jerry O’Flaherty.
Romero had his fair share of flaws, as these articles will make abundantly clear. And yet, as this episode demonstrates, his enthusiasm for games was honest and almost naïvely heartfelt. On the strength of nothing more than good vibes and good chemistry, he gave Porter and O’Flaherty 25 percent of his new studio each, leaving himself and Hall to split the other half equally. It seemed that he still wanted to be a member of a band, not a solo artist. “At worst, if we disagreed on a company direction, we’d stalemate,” he remembers thinking. Not having much experience running a business, he had no idea how damaging such a stalemate could be.
On Christmas Eve of 1996, Ion Storm closed a deal with Eidos Interactive. The British publisher was already riding high off Tomb Raider, featuring the short-shorted and ludicrously proportioned Lara Croft, who despite her lack of corporeal reality was poised to become an unlikely It Girl of the mainstream zeitgeist. Now that Eidos had a full-blown pinup star, why not add a rock star to the stable? They agreed to pay Ion Storm $3 million in advance for each of three games — one from Romero, one from Hall, and one from Porter — plus a slush fund of another $4 million thrown on top, ostensibly for console rights. And they asked for the right of first refusal on Ion Storm’s next three projects as well, again promising $3 million for each of them in advance if they liked what they were pitched. Once the games reached stores and sold through their advances — that ought to take only about 150,000 unit sales, peanuts in a world where DOOM and Quake had sold in the multi-millions — Eidos would pay a 40-percent royalty directly into Ion Storm’s pocket. It seemed like a spectacularly good deal.
Hall’s game, which would come to be known as Anachronox, was meant to combine the gameplay of Final Fantasy and Super Mario 64 with a story inspired by the novels Battlefield Earth and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Romero was predictably unfazed by this unwieldy collection of influences. Sounds great, he said. Design first and all that.
Porter’s idea was vaguely based on the old horror flick Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Romero described it to the press as “a real-time-strategy, first-person-action, weird hybrid of a game, completely hectic and totally hot.” Make of that what you will.
Romero’s own game was to be called Daikatana. It would send its player and two non-player companions hopscotching through two millennia worth of human history, from late Antiquity to the far future. It was to include shooter elements, but was also to be much more than just another DOOM or Quake. Like Hall, Romero mentioned JRPGs as some of his primary inspirations. Stealing a page from the early playbook of Electronic Arts, some of whose rock-star advertisements had sported the tagline “Can a Computer Make You Cry?,” he said that “I want you to become so emotionally attached to the characters that certain events in the game will make you break down and cry, just like in the opera scene from Final Fantasy III.” Who would have thought the man who had brought the verbs “frag” and “gib” into the lexicon could be such a soft touch?
As true-blue a man of his people as Bruce Springsteen was of his, Romero made it a point to hire his employees from the booming DOOM and Quake modding scenes as much as possible, foregoing for the most part folks with established industry résumés in favor of ones who reminded him of him and his friends from id before DOOM changed their lives forever. They all moved into an anonymous-looking but spacious “starter office” in North Dallas.
Standing from left to right: Bob Wright (a friend of Todd Porter’s, he was COO for a spell), Porter, Tom Hall, John Romero, and Jerry O’Flaherty. Seated: Mike Wilson.
Romero poached id’s marketing director, Mike Wilson, to become Ion Storm’s CEO and head PR man. “Honestly, I didn’t see how it could miss,” Wilson would say later. “I had just driven up the rates for a PC game to well beyond where they had ever been. It went up over the course of a year from, like, a million dollars a game to two or three or four [million] in advances. And I’d just renegotiated the Quake [royalty] rate up into the 40s [percent]. So I knew that the going rates were pretty good. And with John’s name, and Tom’s… you know.”
Wilson and Romero both enjoyed taking potshots in the press at their former colleagues from id, and in particular at John Carmack, behaving rather like John Lennon during his “How Do You Sleep?” phase. The irony of this public feud was that Ion Storm’s three games were actually to run under the Quake engine.
Romero soon learned of the disadvantages of not working in the same office where the technology that powers your dream design is conceived. At the E3 show in June of 1997, id demonstrated the upcoming Quake II. Romero pronounced immediately after he saw it that Ion Storm couldn’t possibly make do with the Quake I engine, that they would have to wait until the sequel was released six months from now — id naturally got first dibs on their own engine — and then update their works-in-progress accordingly. Many members of his own team were confused by his stance; they could make Daikatana just fine with the Quake I engine, they said, then upgrade for the next game. Why was a studio that had pure design as its founding ethos suddenly getting so hot and bothered about polygon counts and screen resolutions? But Romero was adamant; it was the Quake 2 engine or nothing. “If we don’t switch engines,” he said, “it [Daikatana] will look ancient in comparison.” Daikatana, originally projected to be a direct competitor to Quake 2 that Christmas, would have to be pushed to 1998. Hall’s and Porter’s projects would also make the switch, suffering similar delays.
While he waited on his new engine, Romero’s broader ambitions for his studio continued to grow. Unhappy with the company’s unremarkable current digs, he set his heart on the “penthouse” at the top of the 55-story Chase Tower, the third or fourth highest (depending on how you measured it) building in all of Dallas. The soaring ceiling and canted walls of the multi-tiered space were made of glass, giving a view that no other location in the city could match. Yet ten years after the skyscraper had first opened for business, the penthouse was still unoccupied; the real-estate agent explained that many potential tenants had looked at it, only to balk at the rent of half a million dollars per month and the almost equally astronomical cost of air-conditioning the giant glass bubble through the long, hot, sun-drenched Texas summers.
The agent must have danced a jig when Romero said that he would take the white elephant anyway. He hired a contractor to turn it into a gamer’s paradise, complete with a “rec area” with billiard and foosball and ping-pong tables and stand-up arcade machines, a deathmatch arena, a labyrinth, a movie theater, a television lounge, a motion-capture stage, an audio-recording studio, $1500 chairs for everyone, and lots of comfy couches and showers for the many employees who would be encouraged to more or less live in the Ion Storm tree house. The renovations would require months to complete, at a cost of $2.5 million. Incredibly, Mike Wilson managed to convince Eidos to foot the bill, by promising that they could house their board of directors here and use the space as a showcase for visiting press. While they waited on the renovations to be completed, Ion Storm took over the 30th floor of the Chase Tower.
The Chase Tower in downtown Dallas, with the Cathedral Shrine of Our Lady Guadalupe sitting just at its base. This juxtaposition of big business and religion, ultra-modernity and tradition, is Dallas, the city where I grew up, in a nutshell.
Their publisher’s generosity in picking up the renovations tab notwithstanding, Ion Storm was spending money at an alarming rate. A perverse incentive emerged from the terms of their contract with Eidos: to initiate more projects so as to collect more $3 million advance payouts to cover short-term costs. Right from the moment he arrived, Mike Wilson had been telling the others that he wouldn’t have taken the Eidos deal, sweet as it looked. Now that they had, he said that they ought to “burn through” the six games they were on the hook for as quickly as
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