A hulking 29-year-old Texan who got his nickname after chugging four pitchers of beer one spring break, Chad “Ogre” Barron reaches for the industrial-size bottle of Tums above his convulsing PC and considers the situation. After numerous delays, Ion Storm is supposed to burn a demo of Daikatana for its eager publisher, Eidos Interactive, in minutes.

This tense moment hit during one of several all-nighters I pulled with Daikatana’s 31-person development team over several months last fall. The team was hustling to stuff stockings for Christmas 1999 — two years after the game’s original release date. As it turns out, they didn’t make it; Daikatana has yet to hit shelves as this article appears in early March. Yet again, the perceived impotence of their boss, gaming demigod John Romero, will be almost pornographically devoured by pundits, nonbelievers, even avid gamers who desperately want to get their fingers on Daikatana. It comes with the territory for Romero, who co-created two of the genre’s bestsellers to date, Doom and Quake. But the fetish surrounding Ion Storm’s growing pains has obscured a deeper mystery: Why do people like these young developers turn over their lives to a computer game?

Since Daikatana’s inception, elite and obsessive gamers have road-tripped from around the world to work with their hero, Romero. They’ve quit school, left relationships and literally built beds under their desks to live and breathe nearly every breath in the house Romero built. Their commitment to a self-described “death schedule” — the final, endless rush to perfect their game — isn’t just some start-up novelty, it’s a way of life.

And life for Ogre since last October is an exploding bug. As he munches a handful of cherry antacids under his Katie Holmes poster, he tries to zero in on what’s causing his screen to orgasm every time his on-screen dude runs out of ammo. Making the ultimate computer game, Ogre knows, is all about focus. To succeed, this son of a small-town nurse and truck driver has to do precisely what Romero, the archetypal gamer, has always done: Shut out the rest of the world. Ignore the press and the other missed deadlines. Sacrifice everything. Exist to escape.

One reason games — with $6.2 billion in sales according to the Interactive Digital Software Association — are giving movies a run for their money is because they offer the ultimate release: role-playing, power, adrenalin. This remains the only medium that can literally make you sweat. Though incessantly shrugged off as kid’s play, it has become something far more compelling, an artistic business and culture of inhabitable, alternate realities. As Ogre and the other hardcore gamers at Ion Storm know, to live these fantasies you can’t let the forces against you get in your way.

Eye of Zeus

“You are so dead!” It’s deep into another endless day at Ion Storm and John Romero is truly in his element: trash-talking in a spontaneous death match, a head-to-head computer game showdown where the player with the most kills wins.

Romero swivels in front of his computer with jet black headphones perched above his speed-metal coif. On-screen, he races through Daikatana’s shadowed corridors wielding the Eye of Zeus — a Grecian staff with a grapefruit-size eyeball jammed on the end. As my character haplessly peeks out from behind a nearby column, Romero flicks his wrist and unleashes a lethal blast of iris lightning. “Eww,” he says, as I burst into human gravy, “that hurt!”

This pain is precisely what millions of tragically limited mortals around the world are counting on Romero to deliver. In real life, gamers — mainly guys between 18 and 34 — are students, bankers, lawyers and drummers, but in Doom or Quake or Daikatana they’re warriors, ruthless, immortal and totally in control. The rush is so good, so pure, so visceral, they eagerly cash in their paychecks every time a new Romero game hits the shelves.

They’ve cashed in so much, in fact, that their Man is now encased 54 floors into heaven (in what has become a rather famous downtown Dallas skyscraper). Downstairs from Romero’s office, the workers’ rec room brims with vintage arcade games, a pool table, ping-pong, foosball. Nearby, there’s a bullpen of high-octane PCs customized specifically for death matches. The alpine lounge upstairs, designed for 24/7 action, has cushy recessed beds, shelves of sugared cereal and a big-screen TV with premium channels and video game consoles thrown in. Everything down to the employees’ maze of corrugated steel cubes feels like the inside of a game.

The ultimate gaming company where the ultimate gamers could build the ultimate games is the culmination of Romero’s lifelong dream. As a misfit kid enraptured with arcade fantasia, he spent so much time playing Atari’s Asteroids that his stepfather once smashed his face into the front of the machine. Eventually, at id Software, he reinvented the industry with the most popular and controversial ultraviolent games in history, Doom and Quake.

But his obsession with gaming would take its toll on his personal life. By his early 20s, Romero was divorced from his wife (with whom he had two sons) because in part, he says, she didn’t share his passion for games. By the time Quake came out in 1996, his romance with id was also over. Romero left to start his own full-blown entertainment company, Ion Storm. Bolstered by $20 million from Eidos, the British gaming company that published Tomb Raider, Romero set to work on the greatest game he could imagine, Daikatana.

“I wanted to elevate shooters,” he says. “Up until then they had been pretty mindless.” He decided to put something even more radical than a rocket launcher into his game: a story. In Daikatana, the player becomes Hiro Miyamoto, a Japanese biochemical student in 25th century Kyoto who must save the world from Kage Mishima, an evil scientist who has stolen the daikatana (Japanese for “big sword”), a magical blade invented by Hiro’s ancestors. Using the sword’s time-traveling powers, Kage is altering history for his own corrupt ends, such as hijacking the cure for an AIDS-like disease. Faced with Hiro’s threat, Kage sends the young warrior on a wild, time-traveling goose chase around Kyoto, ancient Greece, Dark Ages Norway and post-apocalyptic San Francisco.

For added drama, Hiro is teamed with two sidekicks, the “Shaft”-like Superfly Johnson and the beautiful, brainy Mikiko. In other shooters, players can be completely self-absorbed, only worrying about their own hide getting incinerated by a rocket launcher. But in Daikatana, a gamer must command and protect his artificially intelligent sidekicks. And thus comes the second radical notion in the game, empathy. If Superfly or Mikiko dies, Hiro dies too.

From the get-go, Daikatana was, to say the least, ambitious. Every polygon of these grandiose worlds would have to be coded from scratch, to interact seamlessly with the characters and the action. In addition to the complex nuances of the A.I. bots, the game — with its 100 unique levels and monsters spread throughout — had to be built, essentially, as four different games.

Romero, an admitted perfectionist, had spent years making games almost completely on his own. But for Daikatana, there was no way humanly possible to do everything himself, as he would have preferred. Instead, he would have to deal with the most complicated software of all, people. And as he soon learned, he says, “the number one rule in gaming is [that] people break.”

The first 14 hours are always the easiest

“Aaaaarrggggggggh!” Shawn Green screams as he thrashes his computer keyboard against the ground. It’s midnight in the coders cove of Ion Storm and the cubes are as dark as the city below outside. Green, a stocky, long-haired programmer in a paunchy black T-shirt, hunches like an ape at the beginning of “2001” and whacks keys across the floor like loose teeth.