ION Storm and John Romero, its rock star jefe, hold a strange, twisted place in the hearts of gamers. Although people constantly slag the company's excesses and arrogance -- their penthouse office at the top of Chase Tower is one of Dallas's fanciest addresses, and ION spent $2 million refurbishing it before moving in -- gamers follow ION Storm like teeny boppers follow the Backstreet Boys. OK, bad analogy.

The first game John Romero proposed after leaving Id, where he had designed the ground-breaking Doom, Quake and Doom II, was Daikatana, a first-person shooter with RPG elements featuring a samurai sword that allows the player to travel through time. Unfortunately, he proposed the game three years ago, and it has still yet to see the light of day. Staff restructuring, severe personality conflicts and an update from the Quake engine to Quake II all compounded the delays, and Romero's ION Storm has been saddled with an arrogant, bad boy reputation. Delays are the rule rather than the exception in game development, but people were quick to sneer as the game's release date slipped ever further. Why? Well, that may be John Romero's fault.

"Daikatana Is Our Industry's Soap Opera"
In mid-1997, when Daikatana was still expected to make its October '97 deadline, ION Storm ran a series of ads that proclaimed "John Romero Is Going to Make You His Bitch." The world of video games is one where lots of smack is talked -- probably because people who were likely to be on the receiving end of high-school bullying have finally found an arena they rule. But people still have to back up the smack, and after daring the public to hate him, John Romero couldn't pull it off. Though at the time it was probably meant as something of a joke, good-natured boasting rather than a direct affront, Romero himself acknowledges that the campaign fueled the public's adversarial relationship with his game.

As Gearbox Software's Randy Pitchford said in a recent Stomped article, "Can Daikatana possibly be an epic, groundbreaking game? How can it possibly recoup the cost of development no matter how great the game is? What will happen to ION Storm, Eidos and all of the major players in this story? You see, Daikatana is our industry's soap opera. How can we help but watch?"

Daikatana is finally this close to shipping, and a launch party and deathmatch tournament were recently held to celebrate. On Dec. 17, four gamer gladiators, the winners of Mplayer's touring Daikatana tournament, gathered at ION Storm HQ in Dallas to do final battle: Eric "Golden" Hong, Phil "Messiah" Kennedy, Philip "Gauss" Marcus and Brad "Grindage" McKelvie. The last man standing after a double-elimination one-on-one round robin would face Daikatana designer John Romero himself, with some hefty prizes hanging in the balance. CheckOut.com cosponsored the tournament's live webcast, so I was dispatched to cover the event and see just what was going down in Dallas.

Wendy and the Lost Boys
En route I did what research I could, trying to figure out just what kind of lion's den I was walking into -- a Never-Never Land where Stevie "Killcreek" Case, ION's notorious gamer turned designer turned Playboy model (and Romero's significant other) played Wendy to a penthouse suite full of Lost Boys? A hi-tech nursery where petulant rock stars gorged their egos and threw tantrums? I had no idea what to expect.

Of course, hype never quite reflects reality. When I showed up at the ION Storm offices on Friday morning, Romero and his team were friendly, personable -- and tired. Although Daikatana has been pushed back until January at the last minute to avoid rushing a not-quite complete version for Christmas, the designers, programmers and artists have already been on the Bataan Death March that game developers call "crunch time" for more months than they care to remember, and these fellas still have a few more weeks to go. The atmosphere at ION Storm HQ was surprisingly light hearted, though it may have been the lack of sleep and too much caffeine that glazed people's eyes rather than good feeling.

So were John and Stevie the videogame Kurt and Courtney I'd been led to expect? In a word, no. Romero is slight, smaller than I'd expected, and even though he does have that ironed-straight Poison hair, he was reserved and seemed kind of … shy. Hardly the egomaniac I'd been anticipating, but you get the feeling that the last few years have taught him a thing or two. Stevie Case padded shoeless around the office in a little velvet dress, and ended up sitting next to John on a couch, watching a deathmatch in progress. They joked a little about their celebrity status, comparing Romero jokes, and Stevie laughed at an interview with her breasts recently published by PC Accelerator (she's an upcoming cover girl). Bizarre, perhaps, but far from the Guns 'N' Roses shenanigans I'd heard about.

On the other hand, The ION Storm offices were everything I'd heard. The company inhabits a penthouse suite at the tip top of Dallas's downtown business district, with a luxurious screening room called "The Cinema" and an eight-terminal deathmatch center that broadcasts to a wall of 12 televisions -- the bottom eight show the perspectives of the game machines around the corner, while the top four are just for watching TV. If Elvis had been a gamer, Graceland would have looked a lot like this. Glass cases embedded in the walls hold clay models of game characters, and a glassed conference room with metal shutters that slide down like the blast shields in Superman's Fortress of Solitude housed the tournament's prizes: an 800 MHz Athlon MD SYS Cold Fusion PC with speakers, gamepad and a Voodoo 3, a limited edition Daikatana poster by former X-Men artist Marc Silvestri and the Daikatana itself, an actual sword forged especially for the tournament.

Showdown in the Dojo
When the tournament kicked off, there was some confusion and a bit of a learning curve; the players had just a few minutes to familiarize themselves with maps they'd never seen before, and most of the levels seemed better suited to a 16-person free-for-all than a one-on-one match. In a series of 15-minute/15-frag matches (all of which ran out of time long before anyone neared the frag limit), Florida's Messiah came out victorious. After a few minutes' warmup, Romero sat down at a machine and the game was on.

The match played out on the Dojo map, an extension of the scene that appears in the game's intro movie. This is John's level -- he owns it, in gamer parlance. But the big matchup started out surprisingly one-sided. Messiah racked up a quick four frags, while Romero only succeeded in accidentally killing himself, giving Messiah a five-kill lead. Then, in the last three minutes, John came into his own, tying up the game with five unanswered kills. An Eidos PR manager joked, "Romero works best under pressure. That's why we always have him under a deadline." Messiah eked out a final frag just before time ran out and secured a 5-4 victory, but you could finally see the magic people talk about watching Romero play. When he's on, he is on.

Romero good-naturedly handed over the Daikatana and shook hands with Messiah -- after all, what fun would it have been if the kid had lost? -- and Phil Kennedy went home with the sword, an impressive gaming rig and some serious bragging rights. John, of course, still has to finish his game.

Quake III or Unreal Tournament? "Actually, Daikatana."
Later that evening, watching the ION Storm crew blow off steam at a party in the Chase Tower's glassed-in Rotunda, I wondered what the future held for Daikatana and ION Storm. Will the game be able to fend for itself in the face of steep competition from Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament? Can Romero win back gamers' support? Late Friday night, after the reception and far from any ION ears, I asked Eric Hong, the Columbia U. senior who plays as "Golden," whether he preferred Q3 or UT. His answer: "Actually, Daikatana."