At the beginning, there was no reason to suspect tremors. Romero's partners were all industry veterans: Game designer Tom Hall (who would head up his own dream game at Ion Storm, Anachronox) and marketing guru Mike Wilson were from id; business-minded CEO and game designer Todd Porter and art director Jerry O'Flaherty were pals from another Texas game developer, 7th Level. With Eidos' cash, Romero was ready to build the ultimate gaming company; all he had to do was find the ultimate gamers. So he let the word out in the ultimate gamers' hive, the Internet.

Quake freaks swamped Ion Storm's e-mail server with demos of games they had designed using id's DIY wares. Romero handpicked his favorites, figuring that anbody who could wow him with a fresh character or monster or level had a place in the Daikatana posse. Romero, after all, was once just like them: flipping burgers and eschewing sleep, school and relationships to make and play games. So what if all these young dudes had never actually worked in the business before -- if they had the passion, the predisposition, for crunch, that was qualification enough.

By 1997, hardcore gamers filled the cubes alongside their mentor, Romero. Will Loconto gave up his gig as a keyboard player in the band Information Society to be Daikatana's sound designer. Sverre Kvernmo left his home country of Norway to became Daikatana's lead level designer. These weren't hard sacrifices for them to make. "We were all star-struck by the Romero phenomenon," Kvernmo says.

With Daikatana steamrolling for a Christmas 1997 release, everything seemed to be on target except, as it turned out, the technology. At the heart of any computer game is what's called an engine; this piece of code essentially dictates the game's power -- how fast characters respond, how quickly a polygon environment is rendered. Romero, who says he split from id because he had grown weary of id co-founder John Carmack's engine fetish, didn't want to run into the same trap at Ion Storm. Instead he simply licensed the Quake engine and decided to build Daikatana around that. Daikatana, he maintained, was not about the technology. "Design," as his motto went, "is law."

The technology bit back. When Romero booted up the engine for id's next game, Quake II, it was more radically improved than he expected. Though he didn't suspect id of purposefully sabotaging his efforts, he knew that Ion would look pretty damned stupid to put out a game using the old wares. It would be like pulling up to the Indy 500 in skates. "I took one look at it and said, 'That's it,'" he recalls. They had to start over.

Romero coolly shifted gears, informing the team that they would be rebuilding Daikatana around the Quake II engine. Though veterans like Green were disappointed at the news, they weren't deterred. The newbies, on the other hand, were floored. Loconto says he felt "the project was out of control with no direction." Kvernmo, too, says he "couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel."

Factions within the Daikatana team began breaking apart. Loconto, Kvernmo and about half a dozen others took a turn toward the clandestine, opting out of rambunctious death matches and keeping to themselves. Others began lashing out, like one employee who was found alone at his desk, screaming from burnout. Romero grew impatient with the outbursts. "My lead designer was crying every day," he says, "and finally I just fired his ass."

It didn't take long for the inferno to spread. CEO Mike Wilson and Chief Operating Officer Bob Wright were gone after repeated run-ins with the other owners. One November afternoon, Kvernmo, Loconto and 10 others left to launch their own company, Third Law Interactive. A few months later, two more of the original owners, Porter and O'Flaherty, were out the door.

Feeling that Romero had botched Daikatana for his own egomaniacal pursuits, gamers lashed out online. "Gamers can only salivate for so long," says Chris Charla, editor of gaming magazine Next Generation. "Why support a company," one posted, "that cares more about hype and ego and trying to impress the industry blowhards than putting together a good game?" In reality, Romero and his remaining staff were trying to put out a great game. From their point of view, the defections were the unfortunate consequences of growing pains.

Romero blames himself for hiring too many people who didn't have experience with the delays and challenges that, in this industry, are fairly par for the course. Kelly Hoerner, Daikatana's producer, says the problems are unavoidable in a business that's still so young. "People think that [working at a company like this] is going to be fun and not a job," he says. "It's like, 'We're making games, how could that possibly suck?'"

What hurt most was that the bad vibes came about despite the fact that no one outside the company had even played Daikatana. Surely if someone actually sat down behind the controls and fired the Eye of Zeus into the beautifully horrific swamp of robotic frogs, all the garbage would float out the window. Ultimately, it is all about the game. And the game is about power. And the power is about experiencing something so absorbing, so cool, that you have no choice but to forget all the accumulated bullshit of life -- your boring job, your abusive parents, your dismal sex life or even your really bad P.R.

It's like game designer Tom Hall tells me half-jokingly outside his office one night: People don't become gamers for fun, "we do it to work out our pain."

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