But don’t call him a geek. While chess gets written off as nerd play, Nakamura represents a brash new generation of champs reared on video games, hip-hop and the Internet. Known for his speed and aggression, he has been dubbed “the world’s most impolite player” — fighting words in one of the last sports that still prizes modesty and grace. While other players discuss the art and beauty of chess, Nakamura talks like a street fighter. After getting skipped over one year for the chess Olympiad team, he crushed a rival player and called it “payback.” In one notorious interview, he cockily anointed himself the best player in America and deemed his peers conniving foreigners. “There aren’t really any ‘American’ grandmasters that are higher rated than me,” he said. “That’s actually why I still work alone. It’s very hard to trust anybody.”

He’s just as brash in play. While grandmaster etiquette calls for accepting a draw during a deadlocked game, Nakamura consistently breaks rank by refusing to concede. “I don’t give up!” he snaps by way of explanation. Online, he’s nicknamed “the King of Blitz” for his top-ranked mastery of high-speed smackdowns. Opponents have been known to strike back beyond the board. During one tournament, a kid got so angry he allegedly chucked a basketball at Nakamura’s head. But Nakamura has only been emboldened by his bad-boy image. As Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam, editor of New in Chess magazine, puts it, “Nakamura likes being the fighter and the loner. He’s the lone American taking on the world.”

Nakamura’s potent brew of balls and brains has earned him the obvious comparison: Bobby Fischer. But for Nakamura, Fischer, the wunderkind who became a wild-eyed, long-bearded paranoid, who vanished mysteriously during his prime, serves also as a cautionary tale. “He played too much chess and went crazy,” says Nakamura. “I’m not a mad genius.”

But his experience serves as a sort of modern parable about the game. Nakamura rode the fuel of new technologies to become a powerhouse player. But his hard, fast rise has left him feeling burned out and, unlike his coddled peers in Europe, ready to pull the plug. “When it’s this hard to make a living,” he says, “you’re not going to keep the talent in the game. Eventually, they have to go into other things.”

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Much of what mainstream America knows and thinks about chess prodigies comes from the 1993 movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer.” The film follows Josh Waitzkin, a shy prodigy, as he enters chess’s inner circle of bratty kids, domineering parents and narcissistic Obi-Wanlike trainers. Dads come to blows, Ben Kingsley chokes back tears, and when Josh loses a sure-win match, his father chews him out in the pouring rain — without an umbrella, of course. In the end, everyone finds inner peace, no one’s broke, and the Lilliputian underdog overcomes his nemesis. To today’s real chess prodigies, says Magnus Carlsen, a baby-faced 14-year-old Norwegian grandmaster with a rack of corporate sponsors, “That is just film.”

What’s more, the search for the real Fischer is over. He turned up, he’s nuts — spewing anti-Semitic venom and claiming, among other things, that Jews planned 9/11. As a result, Americans, who made Fischer a Cold War hero in 1972 for defeating the Russian champion, Boris Spassky, have soured on the man and now mostly ignore the game. If there’s a brainy young nerd with math and strategy skills, most Americans would rather watch him play cards.

This reality is not lost on Nakamura’s generation. Junior World Champion Elisabeth “Lizzy” Paehtz, a sassy German 21-year-old who competes in miniskirts and heels, has watched numerous peers give up the game in lieu of the far more lucrative world of Texas hold ‘em. Giving up chess for poker, she says, “is tempting for a player; you know you can make a lot of money.” Compared to the $7.5 million prize at the World Series of Poker this year, chess tourney winners get a pittance.

Nakamura hit the relative jackpot when he won the last U.S. Championship and earned $25,000. But a five-figure prize is the exception rather than the rule. While invitation-only events cover the competitors’ travel expenses, players have to pay their own way at less prestigious events. “It’s almost impossible to make a living at the game,” Paehtz says.

The degree of suffering varies according to a player’s nationality. In Western Europe, where living costs are high, players survive by mastering a game far removed from the chessboard: sponsorships. Paehtz, for example, is a celebrity in Germany who chats up talk show hosts and poses on all fours in a slinky outfit for her Web page. She’s now sponsored by a German electronics company.

Carlsen, with his boyish charm and the novelty of being the youngest grandmaster alive, has several sponsorships including one from Microsoft, which periodically flies him to its offices so that he can checkmate VIP geeks. The players from the former Soviet Union generally have it easier because their living expenses are low, and their social status is ensured. “If you’re a successful young chess player there, you don’t have to do anything else,” says Geuzendam. “Everyone treats you like a star.”

But America is another story. The cost of living is high, the respect is nil, and the sponsorships nonexistent. Nakamura explodes when he talks about the other players’ sponsors because, despite being the U.S. champion, he has none. “Any other young person who devotes his life to becoming the best in the world at something is making millions of dollars!” he fumes. He’s exaggerating, but the point is well taken. He’s the best, and for this he has given up plenty. Before he goes onstage, he likes to slip on his iPod and crank up his theme song. “It’s by Green Day,” he says. “‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams.’”

Nakamura’s flair was on exhibit in October when he flew to Switzerland to compete in the prestigious Lausanne Young Masters Tournament, a high-stakes six-day battle to determine the best young chess genius on the planet. The tournament took place inside the palatial Casino de Montbenon in this hilly town on the shores of Lake Geneva.

After two days, the casino was thick with the smell of man dork. Enthusiasts road-tripped from around Europe to smoke, play and watch. Downstairs in the basement, a makeshift bookseller hawked paperbacks including “Genius in Chess,” “Black Is Still OK!” and “Mastering the Najdorf.” Upstairs in the main auditorium, Nakamura had his quarter-finals opponent, an 18-year-old Georgian woman named Nana Dzagnidze, right where he wanted her, backed against the wall. In this, and other chess tournaments, games are time-limited. For that reason, playing the clock is a big part of the game. And few masters play it better than Nakamura.

Schooled from several hours a week of high-speed Internet blitz play, Nakamura is renowned and feared for his ruthless and lightning-fast moves. Chess scribes wield words including “unconventional” and “aggressive” and “gutsy” when characterizing his style. “What did Nakamura have in mind?” they often ask while analyzing his games. Nakamura regularly confounds pundits by, for example, bringing out his queen to the edge of the board on his second move to attack his opponent’s king.

After Nakamura claimed the 2005 U.S. Chess Championship, chess writers took him to task for risky play. “The finish is very good but few purists will rank his play in the same league as Fischer’s — it lacks elegance,” wrote chess scribe Alan Goldsmith. Another chess writer, Bobby Ang, wondered, “When Nakamura reaches the higher echelons of the chess elite, will his style work?” Citing a benchmark of great contemporary players, Ang asked of Nakamura, “Can his brilliance overcome the tactical mastery of Alexei Shirov? Will his will-to-win be sufficient to breach the solid fortifications of Vladimir Kramnik, or Peter Leko? Is his much-touted resourcefulness of a high enough standard to battle with Rustam Kasimdzhanov? I doubt it very much.”

But, as his opponents attest, Nakamura’s skill is not just in his moves, it’s his mind game. “He’s an original thinker who’s willing to take chances,” says Daniel Lucas, editor of Chess Life magazine. “He’s also a player who plays with extreme confidence in his own abilities. Some players are fidgety but he make moves with a sure hand.”

His opponents agree. In Lausanne, the clock on the chessboard projected on the screen behind the players shows Nakamura with 1:06 remaining, while Dzagnidze is down to only 26 minutes and ticking. With her queen cornered, she made a feeble move with a knight, only to soon lose the fight. After the match, she sighed deeply when asked what it’s like to play the American champ.

“Ah, Nakamura,” she said, with a smile, speaking through a translator. “He made me lose myself. He waits for me to make mistake, which I do.” But, despite his prowess, she saw the boy inside the nascent man. “He is like Winnie the Pooh,” she said. “He is cute.”

Nakamura models himself after a more formidable character: Steve McNair, the quarterback of his favorite football team, the Tennessee Titans. “He’s always trying to get better,” he says. “No matter how much he gets beaten up, he plays through the pain.”

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As a lifelong outsider, Nakamura knows the feeling. At age 2, he left his birthplace of Japan in 1987, when his family moved to the U.S. His brother Asuka, two years older than Hikaru, made a name for himself by winning the national kindergarten chess championship in 1992. For the next six years, Asuka quickly climbed the tournament ladders and became the highest ranked young player in the country. Occasionally, he’d play Hikaru, but the younger brother couldn’t keep up. “He was too good for me,” Hikaru recalls, bitterly, “and I was too weak.”

Before long, there was another chess wiz in the house: the boys’ stepfather, Sunil Weeramantry. Their mother, Carolyn Nakamura, a professional violinist, met Weeramantry at a chess tournament after her divorce from Hikaru’s father (whose details Nakamura won’t discuss). A former New York state champion, Weeramantry ran an educational consulting business called the National Scholastic Chess Foundation and taught chess at Hunter Elementary School in Manhattan.

A fixture on the New York City chess scene, Weeramantry says he’s the inspiration for a scene in “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” in which a chess coach locks a herd of obnoxious parents out of their children’s tournament. “I didn’t really lock them behind a fence,” recalls Weeramantry, a 48-year-old Sri Lankan with curly hair and beard. “I took them into a gym.”

With Asuka in the spotlight, Weeramantry had no reason to suspect his youngest stepson’s budding talent. But when Asuka’s chess team, which Weeramantry coached, needed a fourth player for an important tournament, he drafted Hikaru. “He wasn’t very good,” Weeramantry says, “but I looked at his moves and thought, ‘He’s doing something interesting here.’”

Weeramantry, a philosophical sort who likes to slip off his shoes during long talks, didn’t push himself on the boy, and Nakamura, born with a stubborn streak, didn’t come begging. As a chess prodigy in the digital age, he had other options. For past generations, studying chess meant burying oneself in piles of books, magazines and scrawled game notes. By the time Nakamura came around, centuries’ worth of data was just a mouse click away. “It’s a constant challenge,” he says. “There’s always something new you can find out.”

While other prodigies hire coaches or join chess clubs, Nakamura stuck to his autodidactic guns, taking a two-fisted approach to self-education. For hours on end, he scoured through Chessbase, his database program, to find Fischer, Spassky and Kasparov games. But he soon became bored by the rote course of study and, like a lot of pent-up teenage boys, began spending more and more time gaming. When he needed to blow off steam, he went online and participated in time-limited competitions of Bullet and Blitz; the loser either gets checkmated or, more often, runs out of time. “It’s all about being fast,” says Nakamura, who plays under the handle “Smallville,” after his favorite TV show.

Soon, his own trophies began lining up alongside his brother’s in the family’s apartment in White Plains. When he wasn’t at the board or on the computer, Nakamura was playing out moves in his head. Then in April 1998, he passed his brother to become the youngest chess master in the country. Asuka took it well. “We’re not competitive with each other,” Hikaru says. Not anymore. With bookers for Letterman and Leno having called Nakamura, and more tournament wins to follow, the torch was passed. And the heat followed.

Just as soon as he was anointed America’s next boy king, he started reeling from the rampant Fischer comparisons. “It’s nice to hear people say that,” Nakamura says, “but it gets annoying. I’m not Bobby Fischer.”

But does he think he’s a genius, as some suggest?

“No,” he says, but there’s something in his reply that suggests otherwise.

Is he just being modest?

“Somewhat.”

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The Cold War may be over and the famous FischerSpassky match a dim memory, but the EastWest rivalry is alive for Nakamura in more ways than one. Not only are players from the former Iron Curtain countries among his most formidable international competition, they are also his rivals in America. “Almost all of the top players in the U.S. are foreign-born,” Nakamura has said. “That makes it very difficult because if you want to study with them, there’s a possibility that they’ll go on and show everything to their friends.”

Nakamura is not just estranged from his fellow chess players, he’s cut off from the world. Just as he began breaking records on the tournament scene, he began breaking away from his White Plains peers. Concerned with the quality of his education, Nakamura’s parents pulled him from public elementary school after fifth grade and have been home-schooling him ever since.

While Nakamura tries to keep up with his old friends in tennis games and poker nights, he feels like he’s missing out. “The social life [in public school] is better,” he says, quietly, but it’s a necessary sacrifice for his adolescent career. “There’s no way I could travel to all these tournaments if I was in a regular school.” There are perks to life on the road; he’s seen Libya and London, and he’s dated girls in the chess scene. But, like any young celebrity, the years of jet lag and strange hotels have worn thin and left him hardened. “I’ve had to grow up pretty fast,” he says, dejectedly, “which is not a good thing.”

Even winning doesn’t carry the thrill it once did, particularly in light of his grim chances at making a living from his game. As the boy becomes a man, he’s trying to keep his emotions from getting the better of him. “It’s easy to become angry,” he says, “but when you get better, you channel your energy into the game.” But it’s not as easy as it once was for him to do that. So he’s filling out college applications and trading stocks on the Internet, just in case life draws him into a stalemate. “I don’t know what’s going to happen with me,” he says. “It’s too early to tell.”

On Friday in San Diego, however, he has other things on his mind. It’s Round 8 of the U.S. championships, with two days to go. And it’s his move.

Driving among the semis on Interstate 40, Hamel admired the rolling hillside. “Oh, Dee Dee,” he said, “look at the beautiful flowers…” As Deneau would later recall in an interview with the Knoxville News, Hamel didn’t have time to finish the word before the window shattered. Blood and broken glass sprayed Deneau’s lap. With blood pouring from Hamel’s head, their truck sped out of control over the median into oncoming traffic and smashed into a guardrail.

Coming up behind them in a white Mazda west on I-40, a tourist from Roanoke, Va., 19-year-old Kim Bede, and her boyfriend Marc Hickman heard the crash. They assumed someone had blown out a tire. Another bullet proved them wrong. It pierced the passenger side of their car, shattering Bede’s hip. Then the shots stopped, and Newport went quiet again.

When the cops arrived, Hamel was dead. Bede was gushing blood, fragments of bullets in her spine. The woods under the faded billboards along the highway were shrouded in darkness. As word spread around the small town, investigators scoured the brush with spotlights and heat-seeking equipment, looking for a trace of what they feared might be a replay of the Beltway snipers. “We don’t know if it was road rage, a sniper, or what,” Deputy David Jennings told reporters that night.

It didn’t take long to find the answer. Lurking anxiously in the bushes was a lanky, quiet 15-year-old named William Buckner, with his short, hyperactive 13-year-old stepbrother, Josh. The two had been stepbrothers only for a brief while, but had instantly bonded after growing up in unstable families. They had no prior record, a clean slate at school, and seemingly no reason to have fired the deadly shots. But, after breaking down in tears and confessing to the crime, the boys volunteered a reason of their own. A video game made them do it.

Will and Josh said they didn’t mean to hurt anyone. They went out to shoot at the sides of trucks after playing “Grand Theft Auto III,” the bestselling PlayStation 2 shoot’em-up that has become synonymous with the controversy over violent video games. Their assertion spawned a $246 million lawsuit on behalf of the victims against the game’s makers — Sony Computer Entertainment America and Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive Software. “What’s intriguing about this case is that there was a lack of a motive,” says Jack Thompson, the lawyer who launched the suit. “They were acting out the game.”

This, of course, isn’t the first time a video game has been blamed for fueling a violent act. On Feb. 15, another suit citing “Grand Theft Auto” was filed in Alabama, alleging the game led a teenager to shoot two police officers and a dispatcher in 2003. The Columbine massacre in Colorado was blamed, in part, on the killers’ obsession with the first-person shooter “Doom.” John Lee Malvo, the Beltway teen killer, is said to have trained on “Halo,” the Microsoft Xbox alien shooter. Despite many attempts, however, lawsuits against the makers of violent games seldom get very far, and the Buckner suit proved no different. After the Buckners’ victims filed the suit in Tennessee state court, the defendants moved it to federal court. The victims’ attorneys responded by dismissing the suit altogether, possibly paving the way for another shot at the state level.

But the fate of the Buckner boys was already sealed. In Tennessee, kids under the age of 16 cannot be tried as adults, and they must be tried before a judge, not a jury — which meant that a determination in the Buckner case came quickly. In August 2003, after listening to the evidence and evaluating a psychological assessment of the boys, the judge determined that the boys had done something extraordinarily stupid, but without murderous intent.

Will and Josh pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, reckless endangerment and aggravated assault and were sentenced to a nearby juvenile detention center, where they live today. According to state law, they can be detained only until the age of 19. With good behavior, however, they can get out much sooner — as soon as this summer. Deneau called the sentence a “slap on the wrist.” For the first time, the video-game defense seemed to work.

But it didn’t tell the whole story. There’s no easy answer for this kind of tragedy. And, today, the stepbrothers’ friends, family and even the Buckner boys themselves suggest that it was much more than a video game that sent the bullets flying from nowhere that night.

“I didn’t realize the highway was this close,” said Wayne Buckner, Josh’s father and Will’s stepfather, when we walked to the spot on the hill where his boys shot at the cars that night. We were surrounded by trees and tall brush as the cars and trucks sped by on I-40 below. Wayne is a tall, gray-haired 56-year-old in a golf-course vest, blue jeans and baseball cap. “I saw this area in the police diagram,” he said, making his way tentatively around the brush, “but this is the first time I’ve come here. My wife doesn’t want to know where this spot is.”

In his mind’s eye, Wayne had pictured the boys standing much farther away from the road, so far that their bullets would not have easily hit the cars. But, as we looked down at the highway, we were close enough to make out the passengers behind the windows. Wayne’s eyes welled up. “It’s pretty sad,” he said.

It was a sunny winter’s morning in Newport. The path in the weeds that Will and Josh cut with machetes was still discernible. A deflated inner tube they once used to ride down the nearby creek rested against a tree. Pigeons roosted in a rickety liquor billboard a dozen feet away.

It was the birds that first took the blame after the boys were caught that night. Josh told Wayne that they had been shooting at the pigeons and must have accidentally hit the cars in the process. “He said the birds always fly off this billboard toward the interstate,” recalled Wayne. When the birds suddenly abandoned their roost above us, however, not a single one flew toward the road. “I really wanted to believe him,” Wayne said, as we made our way back down to the neighborhood of modest homes below.

The Buckners lived in a split-level brick house on the side of a golf course. The golf cart Will and Josh used to ride sat by the garage with a basketball net. In the backyard, the yapping dogs now had free rein in the impressive tree house Wayne had built for the kids. Inside the living room, Wayne’s wife Donna, lit a cigarette. A petite and pretty 37-year-old in a powder blue sweater, she had dropped to a painfully thin 85 pounds since the incident. “I just can’t get my appetite back,” she said. Wayne excused himself to hit the greens. “He plays too much golf,” Donna grumbled quietly.

Since the shooting, Wayne and Donna have struggled to survive and make sense of the most senseless of acts. Though their sons were found to be reckless, not murderous, that hadn’t made their soul-searching any easier. Ultimately, that search led them to one answer: “Grand Theft Auto III.” “Will and Josh wouldn’t have done this if they hadn’t been playing that game,” Donna said, as she showed me family photos. “They aren’t serial killers. They’re good boys.”

Though taken during better times, the shots didn’t exactly convey adolescent bliss. In one, Josh and Will sit expressionlessly on either end of a black futon facing a giant television screen. Josh, a small, wiry kid with uneven sandy blond bangs and a spotty complexion, leans against an 8-ball pillow in a yellow Fort Lauderdale Surf Sport T-shirt. The stoic look on Will — who’s wearing baggy tan shorts, a yellow Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned over a black Nike tee, a dog-tag necklace, and a half dozen bracelets on his arm — reveals, if anything, a desire for his mother to hurry up and shoot already. In a picture taken on a family trip to the beach, Will stands awkwardly in a blue T-shirt and long blue shorts, bony white arms crossed around his chest, next to Josh in a bright red shirt, arms stiffly down, staring forward; Wayne and Donna are clear across the frame. No one’s touching. “I don’t see how we could ever be a family again after this,” Donna said, as she sparked another cigarette. When I asked her how much they felt like a family before the shooting, she exhaled and said, “Somewhat.”

Will and Josh had an unstable life from the start. Born to Donna several weeks premature, Will suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of one month, leaving him slightly brain damaged. Though able to function normally, he was slower than average, with an IQ of 91. His dad, a factory worker, had little patience for the boy, says Donna, even less after she divorced him, when Will was 3 years old, for fooling around with her friend. “He never wanted anything to do with him,” she recalled. “Will begged him to come over and visit, but he just wrote him off.” Years later, when she took Will to see him on his deathbed, he wouldn’t acknowledge his son. “Will always thought his father hated him,” she said.

Donna’s second marriage was equally difficult for Will. When Will got up at night to pee, her husband would berate the boy for waking him. Will began wetting the bed. Donna soon divorced again. Though Will loved the outdoors, he became more shy and reclusive at school. “He was something of a loner,” Donna said. But he rarely acted out. The worst thing he ever did was to write the word “Fuck” on the kitchen floor with a felt-tip marker. When Donna met Wayne and his young son Joshua in 2002 while working as a bookkeeper at the club where Wayne golfed, Will was ready for a friend.

And so was Josh. Though outgoing and energetic, Josh had had his share of trauma. He was born to a mother, Sandy, who suffered from congestive heart failure. Often sick, she was unable to provide readily for Josh, retreating to her books and her soap operas while her son fended for himself. She died when he was 11.

As the hospital bigwig and an active officer of the chamber of commerce, his father Wayne kept busy and had little time for Josh, who was literally bouncing off the walls. In the first grade, Josh was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and began a lifetime of medication. The drugs made him sluggish but seemed to help to some degree. Josh was warm with friends and family, giving big and frequent hugs. Popular with the girls, he was the only boy invited to his friend Sara Sample’s slumber party. “He was like a little puppy dog,” Sara’s mother, Mandy Epley, recalled.

Still, Wayne had the impression that Josh was suffering. “After his mother died,” Wayne said, “he was on the run all time.” Josh never let on how he was feeling, staying up late playing video games or listening to his Eminem CDs. “He keeps it all inside,” Wayne said. “Anything bad happens, he laughs it off.”

Late one night when Josh was around 11, Wayne heard a strange sound coming from his son’s room. He walked down the hall and opened the door. The room was painted bold yellow and plastered with posters of sports cars. There’s a Lava Lite near a small desk, a student Bible, an enormous boom box. A big black sign reads Go Away.

Wayne half-expected to find that Josh had pulled the blankets from his bed and was sleeping on the floor, a habit his son had taken to without explanation. Tonight, Josh wasn’t there. He was curled up in his closet, crying. He said he wanted his mommy.

When Donna and Wayne married, it seemed as if Will and Josh’s hard times might finally be behind them. The boys hit it off so well that bringing the two families together was easy. They both dug 50 Cent and Tony Hawk and the PlayStation 2. After the wedding, Will and Donna moved to Newport to live in Wayne’s house. Buoyed by the prospect of good times, the parents transformed the basement into the kids’ ultimate playpen: a giant screen TV, a foosball table, posters and pennants of race cars, their very own microwave. Will slept here on a futon under a blanket with the words “Hot Hot Hot” written in flames.

Video games were among their favorite distractions. Paul Buckner, Josh’s 19-year-old stepbrother from Wayne’s previous marriage, gave Josh “Grand Theft Auto III” for his birthday. “When I came downstairs, I’d just see them crashing in their cars,” said Donna. “I didn’t know you could kill prostitutes and stuff like that.” The violence she witnessed, though, was enough to give her pause. “You realize this is virtual reality, not reality,” she told the boys. They nodded, and returned to their game.

Though they had a great time together, things were more difficult, particularly for Will, when they were apart. Because Will was older, he had to go to a different school than Josh and manage on his own. After classes, Will’s guidance counselor, Karen Smith, would see him outside her window wandering the parking lot. “He’d be off by himself,” she said. “He was a bit of a loner,” said his driver’s-education teacher. “He only had a couple of friends. I told him to watch out, because there were other kids here who were taking advantage of him.” Girls would ask Will for money, and wanting to be liked, he’d hand over the cash, never to be repaid.

After school and on weekends, Will fell eagerly under Josh’s wing. While Josh was younger and smaller, he was the town veteran and eagerly assumed the role of Batman to Will’s older and taller Robin. And Will, somewhat slow by nature, needed all the help he could get. “Will is a little more down-the-stream relaxed,” said one friend, “and Josh is the hard-core whitewater rafter.”

To prove his loyalty, Josh steered Will into the arms of his ex-girlfriend, Amanda Hetherington — a smart and iconoclastic 13-year-old with long dark hair and blue paw prints painted on her fingernails. Amanda wrote moody poetry, listened to Marilyn Manson, and was known as one of Newport’s only female skaters. She was a cheerleader, but the sort that would be portrayed by Christina Ricci. She hated it. “It’s just something to do,” she said.

On weekend nights while watching horror movies, Will and Amanda bonded over their disdain of Newport. “There’s nothing to do here but stare at the dots in the ceiling,” Amanda would say. And, though different, they shared a feeling of being outcasts among the ruling kids of Cocke County. “The rednecks have power over everyone here,” Amanda lamented. She thought it was cute that Will refused to wear a jacket emblazoned with the name of the school’s embarrassing mascots, the fighting cocks.

Back at home, it began to seem that Josh was leading Will into more than just a new relationship. He was leading him into trouble. One day, out by the creek behind their house, the two went out shooting with their pellet rifles. Wayne, in one of his father-son bonding excursions, had taken the boys out target shooting with his .22 rifle. They spent the day shooting at cans floating down the water. This time, Josh struggled to aim at his target. When he fired, a pellet flew at a rock, bouncing back and lodging in Will’s neck.

But it didn’t deter them. One day later, about six months before the fatal shootings, Wayne caught the boys sitting in his bedroom cleaning his .22 rifles that they had taken from his closet. “You do not ever, ever do that,” admonished Wayne, who seldom raised his voice with the boys. He grounded them for a week, and dead-bolted his bedroom door whenever he left the house. When he was home, it would remain unlocked.

When you’re a teenager without a driver’s license, it doesn’t take long to get bored. In Newport, you get bored hanging out in the parking lot in Wal-Mart, waiting for the cops to tell you to beat it. You get bored cheering the Fighting Cocks, watching “American Idol,” and swilling soda at the tiny movie theater. You even get bored playing “Grand Theft Auto III,” which is what happened to Will and Josh that night in June.

The summer of 2003 had started on a bad note. Josh failed seventh grade. It turned out that he had not been turning in his homework throughout the year. Wayne and Donna went in for a meeting with the teachers and Josh, but he offered no explanation. As Wayne recalled, “He just said he didn’t feel like turning it in.” While Amanda, Will, Sarah and his friends would be moving on, he would be staying behind. Despite the recent breakdown over his mother, Josh was back to his ways of denial. “He just laughed everything off again,” Wayne said.

Will, on the other hand, had every reason to look up. After months of biding his time, he was one month from turning 16 and getting his driver’s license. He and Donna had even made plans to get him his own car, a used Mustang that he couldn’t wait to get his hands on. With his own wheels, the invisible walls of Newport would finally come down. He could pick up Amanda himself, take her to the skateboard park, maybe even cruise up to Dollywood to soak in the Big Bear Plunge rafting ride. But he would never get the chance.

After a few rounds of “Grand Theft Auto III” that night, Josh felt the boredom set in. Hey, he said to Will, let’s go shoot at the sides of trailer rigs for real. It was doable. Wayne and Donna were home, which meant their bedroom door would be unlocked. They went upstairs. Their parents were watching TV. They asked if they could go ride the four-wheeler. Donna looked outside. The sun was still out. “OK,” she said, “but you gotta be in before dark.”

The four-wheeler didn’t go anywhere that night. Will and Josh sneaked the .22 rifles from their parents’ bedroom closet and hit the trail across the street. It’s a steep incline down to the creek. They passed the rickety pump house, cutting their way down the path they’d cut with Wayne long before. Up the trail, they could hear the semis speeding down the highway. Pigeons fluttered from behind a faded billboard. The boys took a few shots at the birds but, despite the short distance, missed. The trailer rigs would be easier to hit.

They crossed a rickety wooden fence that separated the path from the hill overlooking I-40. Will faced west down the road. Josh ran a short distance along the hill and faced east. They didn’t say anything to each other. They just started firing. Will thought that if he actually hit a rig, the bullets would just bounce off the side. After more than 20 shots, though, they hadn’t hit anything. But Will had a few bullets remaining, and he fired them away. Then they heard the rubber squeal.

After they saw the red truck careen over the median, they ran, assuming they had accidentally shot out a tire. Wayne and Donna were still watching TV when they came back home, and the boys quickly put the guns back in the closet. But their minds and hearts were racing. From the house, Will and Josh could hear the police sirens. When they asked if they could go back outside and hit golf balls, Wayne and Donna didn’t think anything of it.

An hour later, Will and Josh were nowhere to be found. Calls to the walkie-talkies they carried went unanswered. Wayne got in the truck and drove up the road. Donna grabbed a flashlight and hit the trail, fearing they had some kind of accident. Desperate, she called 911 and reported the boys missing. The cops called her back. “We have your boys right here,” she was told.

While investigating the scene of the shooting, a cop saw Will and Josh standing up on the hillside. “It’s not a place you expect to find kids around,” said Al Schmutzer, the district attorney who would prosecute the case. “The officer began talking to them and getting unusual answers.”

When the boys were released to their parents, they said they had been out shooting pigeons with their pellet gun, and when the pigeons flew over the highway, they might have accidentally shot the cars. But their parents knew enough to know that a pellet couldn’t do that kind of damage. Two days later during questioning over a polygraph test, Will and Josh broke down and confessed. “They said they’d got the idea from playing the game,” Schmutzer said. The Buckners were ordered to turn over to the police their guns and their copy of “Grand Theft Auto III.”

As the sensational news of the video-game killers hit, the residents and national media descended upon the small town. Josh would be the youngest person tried for homicide in Newport history. In written statements, the boys expressed remorse. “I will always hate myself for what happened,” Will wrote. “If I could give my life to bring him back, I gladly would. I know what I did was stupid. I didn’t think anyone would get hurt … I am so so sorry, and no matter how long the judge gives me, it won’t be long enough because I will still hate myself.” Josh wrote, “I am sorry … I hate that it happened … I know what it is like to lose someone because I lost my mother when I was 11. And it has been hard without her.”

On the day that the boys were being led into the courthouse, Amanda rushed down to get a glimpse. Will saw her long dark hair in the crowd and blew her a kiss as the cameras rolled. She knew they would never want to hurt anyone, but rejected the idea that the game was to blame. “I don’t think it would persuade them to do this,” she said over dinner at a local restaurant called the Fox n’ Hound. “I mean, my aunt plays that game.”

Amanda has been writing poems for Will. “Hold my hand,” goes one, “make me stop crying. By myself I feel like dying. I can be strong if you stay. We can be together, we’ll be okay. So here we are, together at last. We’ll be okay, forget the past.” But she hadn’t brought herself to ask Will and Josh why they fired the shots that night. “I don’t want to know the reasons,” she said, picking at her food. “It freaks me out.”

The sun was coming down over the barbed-wire fence surrounding Will and Josh’s gloomy new home, a juvenile detention center outside Newport. Behind the two-story chain-link fence that encircles the brick buildings, a stocky guard slowly led a group of prisoners across the pavement. Two rows of tough kids — murderers, sex offenders, drug dealers — walked single file behind him. Yesterday, a kid came in after shooting his dad in the face.

It was last February, and I was sitting outside the fence in the parking lot with Wayne and Donna, who were finishing their last cigarettes before walking inside to see their sons. They had been coming promptly for each allotted visit — one hour every day but weekends and Fridays. Over on the basketball court behind the fence, we could see Josh braving the cold to squeeze out a few more minutes of hoops. Despite the chill, he was wearing only a green short-sleeved T-shirt and long baggy black shorts. As a couple of taller kids hogged the ball, he lagged behind them, quickly rubbing some heat along his arms with his hands before they turned around. “I worry about him in there,” said Donna. “He’s a lot smaller than the other kids.”

Life inside the juvenile center was hard for the boys from the start. Will and Josh were assigned to separate 6-by-8-foot cells. They spent the day taking classes. Lights out by 6:30 p.m. Their parents couldn’t get them anything to help bide the time. When they requested Bibles for the boys, they were told no; kids use pages of the Bibles to roll smokes.

According to Wayne and Donna, Josh soon stopped taking his ADHD medication because the other kids were stealing it from him. Josh, however, had been known to willfully decline the medication in the past. With his hyperactivity unleashed, he started getting into trouble, talking out of place, showing up at visitors meetings without wearing his requisite uniform. One day he was caught piercing the tongues of a bunch of other kids with a shared thumbtack.

Will soon stopped playing follower to Josh’s leader. Unlike Josh, Will had few infractions. He began doing well in school and was on the fast track to getting out. Last July, Will was transferred to a much less punitive group home facility. Josh soon began shaping up his act and was transferred to a separate group home last November. With good behavior, the two may eventually take the next step and be released for good. If and when that happens, however, the stepbrothers will not be sharing a house again. According to Donna, “the judge doesn’t want the boys back together.” When Will walks out the door, she said, she plans to move with him out of state, leaving Wayne and Josh behind. It doesn’t seem as though there will be love lost between the boys. “Josh is going to pay for some of the things he’s done in here,” Will told his mother without elaboration.

That’s not all that’s changed in Will’s mind, Wayne and Donna learned after they passed through the metal detectors to see him that cold February night. With guards standing watch, Will sat at the table in his uniform, exchanging greetings with his parents. After a bit of small talk, Donna looked him in the eye. “You’ve had a lot of time to think about what you’ve done,” she said. “Do you still think it was a video game that made you do this?”

Will sat up and became emphatic. “It wasn’t the game that made us think to go out and do this,” he said, bitterly. “We wanted to do this. The idea was to act out the game. But the game didn’t reprogram our minds.” When asked to elaborate, he just repeated that phrase: “The game didn’t reprogram our minds.” And he said he wished the lawsuit against the game’s makers had never happened. With Will’s time up, the guards came and took him away.

Would Will and Josh have done what they did if it hadn’t been for the game? While researchers try to discover whether there’s a link between violent media and aggression, the truth is that it’s impossible to say why the Buckners pulled the trigger that night. Ideas come from the most random of places, and violence has certainly been inspired by the most random of things, from the “White Album” to “Catcher in the Rye.” Even if Will and Josh hadn’t played “Grand Theft Auto III,” who knows what else might have inspired them to break out the .22s.

Whatever the reason, it was, as Will suggests, surely much more complex than a game — and to suggest otherwise is to deny the experience of so many kids like these. Maybe it was a broken home, death, rejection. Maybe it was bad biochemistry, bad grades, dumb mascots. Maybe it was the overwhelming dread of being stuck with nothing left to do. Maybe bullets fly from nowhere when nowhere feels likes it’s everywhere after all.

As Donna lit a cigarette outside, I asked her if she was surprised that Will was backpedaling from blaming the game. She said she was, but wondered if he wasn’t backing off for another reason.

“What reason is that?” I asked.

“Because the kids inside there are fans of ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ and they told him if he gets the game pulled from the shelf, they’re going to beat him up.”

“I’m interested in using the computer as a creative tool, as a recording tool, as a musical instrument tool,” he says, while nursing some carrot juice in a stylish hotel on a recent jaunt to New York. “I’m not interested in using the computer in the way the manual says to do it, not in the clean way, but to add a collision of humanity and electronics.” He pauses, then adds with a smirk: “There’s not always this peaceful coexistence.”

That’s putting it mildly. From his recent live CD and DVD, “And All That Could Have Been,” back to his debut “Pretty Hate Machine,” Reznor has pursued the sonic conflicts of dissonance and harmony, darkness and light, tension and release, to the point of obsession — not to mention epic delays. But now as he decides which of the 40 songs he’s written this past year will be recorded for his next Nine Inch Nails album, Reznor says he might have tamed his inner geek. “So far this record seems more lyric-oriented and musically far less dense: spatial and kind of brutal and open and less filled-up tracks,” he says. “But once you let me in the studio,” he laughs. “I have to restrict myself so I don’t go overboard.”

Reznor’s tempestuous relationship with machines began in, of all places, a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. This was the early 1980s and Reznor was a forlorn teenager washing dishes at a HoJo in Mercer, Pa.; his only reprieve was an Asteroids machine in the lobby.

One night as he was leaving the kitchen, he noticed the back panel of the Asteroids machine slightly ajar. Reznor instinctively pried it open. “I remember looking inside at all the points and settings,” he recalls, “and thinking, whoa, I’m not allowed to see this thing!” It was the first glimpse of what would become the predominant theme of his music: the dark worlds that thrive behind life’s curtains.

Reznor had other shadows in his life at the time. His parents had divorced, leaving him to be raised by his grandmother. Music was his first escape. He began studying piano at the age of 5. But as he became a teenager, he found more identifiable inspiration in the form of Kiss and began playing in bands of his own. “When your world has basically consisted of being trained to be a classical pianist by a nun,” he once said, “the idea of standing on a stage breathing fire, spurting blood, and playing loud rock ‘n’ roll was incredibly exciting to me. I began to realize that rock ‘n’ roll could take me places that classical music never could.”

Video games, which had just exploded onto the entertainment scene, went hand-in-hand with his newfound passion for bleeding eardrums. “There was something punk rock about them,” Reznor says, “that idea of rule breaking and this hasn’t been done before. It really struck a chord with me.”

Reznor got himself an Atari 2600 home gaming console and spent long afternoons at the house of a friend who had a coveted color RadioShack computer. Soon enough, he had his very own Commodore 64 and began teaching himself to program. He went on to study computer science at Allegheny College and worked briefly as an engineer until he decided the time was right to pursue his dreams. “When you could use computers to make music,” he says, “I wanted to be right in there.”

With little money, the 23-year-old holed himself up in a room in Cleveland with a Macintosh computer, three keyboards, a cheap sampler, and a four-track cassette recorder. His plan was to record an entire demo himself, playing all the parts, and then, if he sold it, to re-record with a full band. The dream came only half true. He got the record deal, but decided to simply release the demo itself in 1989 as his debut record, “Pretty Hate Machine.”

He recalls, “I was like, ‘No, I don’t think the idea should be to fix this stuff. This sounds cool like it is and why be ashamed of this? It’s a drum machine and why not?’ That took a little courage at the time to do it. And I was pleased with that. Instead of looking at it as a limitation, it was like, ‘OK, this is a machine.’”

Listeners agreed, helping the album sell more than a million copies on the strength of intricately layered industrial songs, including “Head Like a Hole” and “Down in It.” But despite his success, Reznor found that not everyone shared his respect for music machines. There were still plenty of critics and peers who felt that songs were meant to come through flesh and blood, not wires and knobs. They viewed artists like Reznor, who toured with live musicians but incorporated prerecorded tape loops, as somehow less legit. “We’d get that ‘You’re not a real band’ thing,” he says, “but you know, ‘Fuck you. If that’s a real band, you’re right. We’re not one. Don’t come see us. Stay home.’”

For his next two records, “Broken” and “The Downward Spiral,” the technology became something of an obsession, something to play with, something to deconstruct. It was in the spirit of artists like Jimi Hendrix who lit their guitars on fire or smashed them into amps to find new sounds. “I had a whole new tool chest of things that no one had ruined yet,” Reznor says. “No one had figured out the wrong way to do it or the interesting way to do it.”

This was best achieved, he decided, by throwing away the manual and experimenting as he would with a new videogame, pressing random buttons and veering off beyond the screen to see what would happen next. In the song “March of Pigs,” for example, he purposefully recorded an out-of-tune sample of a drum kit, then played it back through a keyboard to create a sound that was at once robotic and organic.

But his explorations soon bore surprises of their own. The software Reznor was using became so unreliable that he would come back the night after recording to find the computer spitting out undistinguishable sounds. Instead of starting over, he decided to record the weird output, to capture the spontaneity of this strange new collaboration. Computers were no longer just tools for Nine Inch Nails, he says: They were “musical companions.”

The companions, however, soon began to conspire against him. While completing “The Downward Spiral” in 1994, Reznor downloaded Doom, the new first-person shooter from id Software. Reznor, who had lost many nights to id’s previous game, Wolfenstein 3-D, saw production grind to a halt once again. “I just could not believe the great action, super politically incorrect demons and all kinds of cool stuff,” he recalls. “We lost our minds.”

Reznor became so addicted to the game that he even brought a desktop PC for his tour bus so that he could keep playing. On a stop in Dallas, he invited the creators at id Software to come backstage to his show. “They reminded me of my best friends I had in high school who sat in the computer lab all day,” he says. “It was very cool. I was like in awe of them.” Reznor ended up composing the sound effects for their next game, Quake.

By the time he was ready to record his next album, Reznor felt that maybe he’d had enough of computers for the time being. He thought it was a good moment to bring a real live carbon-based band of collaborators into the studio once and for all. To prepare, Reznor rented a house by the ocean in Big Sur and began writing songs at a grand piano. The results, he quickly decided, sucked. “Once I start sounding like Willie Nelson,” he says, “then I’m like, OK, I have to get back to the computer.”

He returned to machines with a vengeance to record 1999′s “The Fragile.” Everything at this point could be composed on the computer. A new world had arrived filled with virtual instruments that could sound as good as, if not better than, real ones, all the way down to “the badness of them,” Reznor says, “the buzzes and the rattles.” He could have an entire studio of guitars and amps reduced to one little chip. It was literally too good to be true. Reznor became overwhelmed by the possibilities. Suddenly, there were dozens of tracks to manage, files to organize, programs to debug. Everything, he felt, was falling apart. “We’re at a crisis point,” he told his crew. “We can’t continue this record.”

To save the process, Reznor backed away from the machines for the first time in his life. He let someone else do the programming. Though the album was completed, Reznor found parts of the experience frustrating. He felt unable to express himself as fluidly as he did when he knew exactly what he could get from the computers.

Today as he prepares to record his next album and compose the soundtrack for the Doom III game, he has arrived at this necessary, though not entirely happy, medium. “I just spent the last month reading software manuals every day,” he says with a sigh. “I learned that I don’t want to relinquish that [programming] duty to others. I will day to day. But I need to be able to sit down and do what I want to do if I want to do it.”

The result, he suggests, might owe as much to Hank Williams as to Nine Inch Nails. Reznor says he’s been listening to country greats like Williams, Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash on his iPod MP3 player while walking his dog around town. “I’m not going to be singing blues in a country format,” he assures me, “but this music has been making me appreciate simplicity and directness.”

He’s even been contemplating a tour in Europe with a string quartet. It’s another way to challenge himself to not lose sight of his craft. “Just because you can buy a box of software now for a couple hundred bucks that can make a great-sounding album,” he says, “that doesn’t mean you’re going to make a great record. What matters are the songs.”

Since “retiring” from competitions last year, Fong has been devoting himself full-time to Gamers.com, an ambitious portal for gaming fans. With a recent influx of $11.5 million in venture capital, as well as a partnership with AltaVista, Fong is positioning his company to be the gateway for the coming tidal wave of next generation, Internet-ready console players.

To service them, he’s built a staff of 150 full-time gamers, hand-picked for their expertise in everything from first-person action shooters to traditional standards like bridge. Each day in their Richmond, Calif., office, the staff aggregates content from across the Net, so that someone coming to the site can get hip to the latest news, patches and gossip in the expanding gaming universe.

“It’s one-stop shopping for game players,” Fong says. And a potential one-stop gold mine for Fong, especially considering that next generation console makers like Microsoft and Sony are expected to spend over a half-billion dollars to promote their new products.

Fong’s journey from digital jock to entrepreneur is a perfect case study of the deep new worlds that have popped up during the rise of Generation Pong. Ten years ago, the thought of a professional gamer would have been absurd. Now, gamers have not only become cultural icons, but industry players. If Fong has his way, he says, “computer and video gaming will become one of the largest sports in the world.”

What made you decide to do a portal for gamers?

We saw a need in the industry for something like this. There are literally thousands of Web sites dedicated to games on the Net, but no single, comprehensive source. Take all the online zines. Almost half of them are professionally done. That means they’re all competing for exclusive stories. And if one of them gets an exclusive on a game, none of the others will tell their users about it. This results in creating a fragmented community. If you want to be on top of the news every day, there’s nowhere to go; you have to surf through a variety of sites.

My brothers and I decided to start Gamers.com back in 1996. We had a huge passion for gaming and believed that it would be a “big deal” down the road. So one night, we logged onto the Internet, registered “gamers.com” for 75 bucks, and off we went. The first two years of our business were essentially a makeshift business school for us — we made every possible mistake entrepreneurs could make, but it was great because we learned how to be profitable without needing outside funding. It wasn’t until two and a half years later that we felt ready to take the next step of raising capital.

Hardcore gamers constitute one of the most idiosyncratic communities on the Net. How can you appeal to them without alienating the mainstream crowd?

Right now, hardcore gamers make up about 2 million of the 150 million people who play games. They’re a lot like bikers in biker clubs. If you’re not a hardcore gamer, you might be almost as scared of going into one of their communities as you would be visiting a biker club. But really that’s just giving in to a stereotype of the gaming community. Many hardcore players don’t consider themselves hardcore. Technically, I’m a hardcore player, but I’m not hardcore into video games. Part of what we’re trying to do is introduce people who are not really hardcore into gaming. We’re trying to make it easy and less fragmented. Instead of surfing around for a site, say, dedicated to Starcraft, you can come here. The gaming community is very tribal; we’re trying to get you into the clubs.

What about the niche sites for gamers like Blue’s News or ShugaShack, which sprang up from the 3-D action gaming communities?

Blue’s News is very detailed; you’ll find everything down to news on the latest patch for some obscure game. From a macro level, that’s what we do for news. We tell you about all places that are reporting news. If it’s Friday night and you want to find out what people think about a game you want to buy, you can come here. Would you rather read one opinion from one critic or get a snapshot of what the whole industry thinks, or what the whole community thinks?

How will the old PC community be affected by the console community coming online?

The next generation consoles [like the Internet-ready Playstation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox] are going to revolutionize the Net. They’re Trojan horses into the living room. It’s going to be great, bringing in millions of people online. That’s good for everyone. New communities will form for console players. And there will be an overlap of communities for consoles and PC players.

Games will be their entree to the Net, so they’ll be looking for games content. Part of what we believe is that there will be partnerships with major console manufacturers — like Sony and Nintendo. It’s like when you install Windows 2000, your default browser is Internet Explorer. It’ll be the same with games. You’ll log on with your Playstation 2 and go to a Playstation 2 page. Having partnerships with them, for us, is key.

You’ve been called “the Michael Jordan of computer games.” Jordan has also become equally well known as an entrepreneur. How do you see yourself evolving as an “athlete-turned-entrepreneur?

I think my life has already evolved from an “athlete” to an entrepreneur. Whether I’m going to be as successful, or lucky, in business as I was in competitive gaming, only time will tell.

I approach Gamers.com in the same way I approach a play. During my competitive gaming, one of my mottoes was “Sometimes you do your best and it doesn’t matter, so there’s no point in getting nervous.” If I played my best and lost that never really bothered me. The other thing was that I always approached competitive gaming like speed chess. Chess is not a strategic game, but you’re always thinking fast — two or three steps ahead of your opponent. You’re always placing yourself in the other person’s perspective. I got a reputation for doing that so well that people starting calling it “Thresh ESP.” But I was just anticipating my opponent’s move.

I always put my focus on strategy and tactics; I’d say 70 percent of my energy was on that and the other 30 percent was on skill and precision. I applied that approach to every new game I played: Doom II, Quake, Quake II, Quake III. If I was having a bad day in terms of aim and reflexes, which everyone has, I would just defer to strategy and tactics to squeak out a win. I was always consistent with my style. From a business aspect, it’s very applicable. I try to place myself in the user’s perspective; it’s just another person across the table from me. In that respect, I’m not special. It’s just the way my brain’s always worked. It’s how I’m wired.

How did you get started in electronic gaming?

I was born in Hong Kong in 1977, and didn’t move here to California until I was 11. Throughout my life, I’ve attended American schools, so the move here wasn’t a big deal. My dad has worked at Hewlett-Packard for as long as I can remember, and my mom was an English teacher in Hong Kong. I have two brothers, one older, Lyle, and one younger, Bryant. Both of them have always been really into computers, but I was not. In fact, I hated computers and was much more into sports … until my bros introduced me to Doom. Since that fateful day of playing my first multiplayer game of Doom, I’ve been hooked. I love to compete, be it in sports, business or gaming. It makes the “game” a lot more fun when there’s something on the line.

How did it feel when you realized that you were becoming something of a gaming celebrity?

To this day, I am still very pleasantly surprised when people ask me for my autograph. It’s kind of neat and awkward at the same time.

How have you managed to make a living by playing computer games?

In the past, I have been sponsored by companies such as Microsoft and Diamond Multimedia, not unlike how Michael Jordan is sponsored by Nike — minus the big paycheck. While competing professionally, I also wrote several strategy guides, had a monthly column in a popular gaming magazine and ran Gamers.com at the same time. Oh, and the prize money was always helpful, too …

Why did you decide to stop competing?

I still play on a regular basis, but haven’t had much time to compete in official tournaments. In the past, I’d play an average of an hour a day until two weeks before a tournament, [when] I’d step up my playing time to four to eight hours a day. Now that we’ve raised $11 million in funding for my company, Gamers.com, it’s literally impossible for me to take that much time off work to focus on a tournament. Hopefully I will eventually have enough spare time to compete seriously again.

How has the deathmatching/ LAN-party/tourney scene changed since you first got involved?

The entire gaming scene has evolved tremendously since when I first started. For one, there are a lot more people playing these days. As a result of the masses getting into gaming, that has driven corporate sponsorships of gaming tournaments to a new level, which in turn drives more people to play. Tournaments today regularly feature $100,000-plus prize pools, with the first-place winner taking home approximately $40,000-plus. It’s become a very serious sport and I think it’s great for the industry. Certainly the more people that get into gaming, the better it is for the industry and the sport.

With the proliferation of big money tournaments comes the not-so-good side as well — some people feel the fun aspect of gaming is lost since competition has become so fierce.

Now Ion Storm’s 31 game developers don’t just work in the shade, they work in the black. To get into their cubes, they part felt drapes like photographers entering miniature darkrooms. It was a fairly awesome and ironic sight as I wandered through the glass-domed gamers’ haven last October. All I saw were rows of caves. And of these caves, Weasl’s was the darkest.

“I call myself a mushroom,” Weasl told me as I crouched inside, “because I’m always working in the dark.” With a couple extra layers of felt draping his cube, there’s not even the slightest trace of light, let alone fresh air. But Weasl, a stocky, long-haired 20-year-old who resembles Meatloaf in the ’70s, doesn’t seem to mind. “Darkness is really helpful when you’re trying to shut out outside influences,” he explains, tweaking an animated pool of lava on his screen. “After you spend enough time in here, your personality adapts.”

Luke “Weasl” Whiteside is the newest level designer to join the Daikatana team and, in a way, the most enigmatic. Since he came to the company just a few months before my visit, Weasl managed to miss out on Ion Storm’s tempestuous back story. He’s still so awed to be working here that sometimes he doesn’t leave. Underneath his desk there’s a pillow. On some nights, he hunkers down below his computer, munches some M&M’s and goes to sleep. For Romero, who dreamed of populating a company with gamers as intense as himself, Weasl is as hardcore as it gets.

The only child of a single mother, Weasl got his nickname while growing up in a small town north of Seattle. “I always used to weasel out of things,” he says. To get out of mowing the lawn, he would find the mower and siphon out all the gas. “I’d do anything for a little freedom,” he says. Like Romero, Weasl never really fit in at school beyond computer class — the one place he excelled. Weasl says he suffered from attention deficit disorder and bouts of depression and found it difficult to deal with the social and scholastic pressures. Instead, he drifted to the more imaginative world of role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons or Magic: The Gathering. “They let you be the person you aren’t,” he says.

When his favorite computer teacher left his high school, Weasl, then a freshman, dropped out. Just when he needed to, he discovered Quake. Weasl, never a big athlete, suddenly found a competitive, visceral arena where he could truly rule. He began spending all his time in online death matches and the burgeoning community of Quake message boards, newsgroups and chat. There, he met a group of friends and they started their own clan, 311, which would meet online to practice and compete. “It was fascinating to find all these people who thought the same way as me,” Weasl explains.

Living with a friend who was becoming increasingly suicidal, he says he started itching for a way out. One night, Weasl, who had started designing his own levels of Quake, met another amateur mapper (gamespeak for a level designer) in an online chat room. The mapper lived in Dallas which, as Weasl well knew, was like Devil’s Tower in “Close Encounters” — the Mecca, home to Quake’s designer, John Romero, and his new company, Ion Storm, plus a lot of other gaming companies. When Weasl gushed over the Dallas scene, the mapper told him he could come down and crash at his place. So last summer Weasl withdrew the $200 savings he had earned working at Taco Bell, packed up his computer, and got on a Greyhound bus headed south.

Once situated, he got down to work: mapping out his own level for a popular new shooter called Half-Life. He finished two weeks later at 5 a.m. Weary and with nothing to lose, Weasl e-mailed the level blindly to his hero, John Romero. As he crawled into bed, he hardly expected a response; after all, it was like sending a student film to Quentin Tarantino and hoping for a call. But when he woke up at about 6 p.m., not only had Romero replied, he wanted to take Weasl out to dinner. That night.

Hours later, Weasl was cruising shotgun in Romero’s yellow Hummer. The two hit it off, talking endlessly about their favorite games and levels. A few days later, Weasl called his best friend back in Washington.

“I was like, ‘Guess where I am, dude, Dallas!’” Weasl enthusiastically recalls. “My friend was like, ‘Oh that’s cool. What are you doing down there?’ I said, ‘Working at Ion Storm.’ Then I could hear this silence at the other end,” Weasl continues, cracking a smile, “and a couple seconds later my friend’s like, ‘What?’” Weasl shakes his head disbelievingly, apparently still struck by his awesome twist of fate — the fact that he’s actually here working with Romero. That he’s no longer alone.

When I returned to Ion Storm in November, Daikatana crunch mode had turned vicious. Though the monsters, levels, sound and art were nearing completion, there was a formidable task ahead: burning through the remaining 500 bugs in time for a Christmas 1999 release. To attempt this (unsuccessfully as it turns out), Romero had upped the team’s core hours to include weekends; the staff was elbowing for bed space in the lounge.

The death schedule was claiming victims. Mike Breslin, the company’s affable vice president, had been stricken with the flu after a whirlwind marketing tour of the country. The virus had been making its way around the office, taking down a few other team members along the way. Most noticeably absent is Stevie “Killcreek” Case, Daikatana’s accomplished level designer and only femme fatale. When Case had last come into the office, I’m told, her lips were blue from a kidney infection. A couple of guys down by the pool table suspected it had something to do with her crash diet. “Yeah,” one added with an irrepressible grin, “she had to get ready for Playboy.”

Case, 23, had been selected to appear in a six-page spread for an upcoming issue of the magazine. She caught Playboy’s attention after its staff heard rumors about a bleached blond bombshell who had not only beaten the notorious Romero in an online death match, but got a job working on his hotly anticipated new game.

The legions of young men who populate the online gaming scene, of course, were intimately familiar with Case’s story. As young men are wont, they eagerly drew their own conclusions about how this woman — this chick — landed herself in gamer’s paradise.

“There’s an assumption that the only way a woman could get on this team was because of her looks,” Case told me during my last visit. “As long as I’ve been gamer, I felt I had something to prove.”

Case grew up in Olathe, Kan., the daughter of a social worker and school teacher. As a competitive tomboy, she took to sports early on, earning the award for freshman athlete of the year at her high school. At the University of Kansas, she became a tomboy of a different sort, battling her guy friends in the online arena of Quake.

Though an A student, Case was already bored with her plans for law school. The more fun she had playing Quake, the quicker her plan faded away. During a trip to Dallas, Case managed to score a death match with Romero (who was known to challenge gamers who visited the office). Case lost, but just barely, and challenged him to a rematch. The next time around, Romero got clocked. As penance, he uploaded a Web shrine in Case’s honor. Her last semester, Case played so much Quake, she failed to graduate.

Liberated from the law school path, Case returned to Dallas where she eventually found work as a beta tester at Ion Storm. Gradually, she felt herself shedding the Midwestern girl in denim pants and dirty-blond bob. “This was such a creative environment that I finally felt the freedom to be whomever I wanted to be,” she says, “so I decided to reinvent myself.” She stopped eating meat, went to the gym, lost 50 pounds, bleached her hair. By the time she had been promoted to a mapper on Daikatana, the new Case — complete with breast implants, midriffs, leopard pants and a boyfriend, Romero — was in the house.

Posing in Playboy, she says, is not only another step into self-confidence, it’s her way to encourage more women to pursue their dreams, even if those dreams are told in computer games. “When people hear that I’m a gamer, they expect me to be unattractive and overweight,” she says, “I’m trying to defy expectations.”

It just goes to show, as corny as it sounds, sometimes when you play a game, you don’t only win. You find yourself.

Brandishing my silver claw, I hear footsteps

It’s a snowy, gray night in Plague Village, an ominous town in the heart of Daikatana’s Norwegian episode. As Hiro Miyamoto, I have just jumped effortlessly off a cliff into the outskirts of a seemingly abandoned medieval town. When I look back up, soft layers of winter clouds sift quietly overhead. After the height of this cliff, I feel like I should be dead or, at the very least, limping.

Deep within the ominous strain of minor chords, I hear the icy crunch of footsteps approaching. Taking no chances, I brandish my silver claw in case the ones coming are werewolves. I jog cautiously around a nearby wooden shack that, upon closer inspection, is riddled with arrows. Crouching down, I do my best to hide but it’s not working. The footsteps are getting louder. The forces against me are closing in.

For a moment, I’m reminded of the Ion Storm troops who have so adeptly instilled this fear in me — and how, throughout their lives and careers, so many forces instilled the fear in them. As Daikatana finally nears release this spring (there are hints that the shooter really will hit shelves within weeks), they’re more than ready for a little R&R. But, shortly enough, they’ll be on to the next title. Crunch mode, after all, is a chance to live inside the game. But before they move on, they’ll get the payback for their endless hours — a chance to experience what mapper Larry Herring describes as “the ultimate rush:” knowing that others will soon inhabit the world they helped create.

It’s no wonder my heart is pounding so convincingly. Leaping out from behind the shadows, I stand armed for battle. But, to my surprise, these aren’t werewolves poised to end my dream. They’re my faithful sidekicks, Superfly and Mikiko. How sublime it seems as the wind howls around us. In this most brutal of worlds, the gamers have given themselves friends.