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Recently in Salon Technology

How do game developers hack it?
All-nighters, 18-hour days, sleeping at the office -- John Romero's posse keeps up a "death schedule" to get Daikatana out of beta.
By David Kushner
[03/07/00]

Technology: View from the top
"Opt-in rules!"
How does 24/7 Media CEO David Moore target ads without raising the ire of privacy activists? He asks permission.
By Lydia Lee
[03/06/00]

Patently absurd?
Amazon.com's patent on its affiliate program has roiled the Web, but such protections may actually promote innovation.
By Damien Cave
[03/03/00]

Where do you want to work today?
Microsoft goes for "station domination," wallpapering a San Francisco subway station with recruiting ads.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
[03/02/00]

Books
Should your boss know about those visits to the shrink?
Employers sniffing through medical records, would-be forgers having UPS deliver your signature -- Simson Garfinkel reveals a world rife with privacy violations in "Database Nation."
By Thomas Scoville
[03/01/00]

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By David Kushner

March 8, 2000 | Next to vampires, no one hates the light as much as gamers. There's nothing worse than a big, bad glare blinding down on a computer screen. So when Ion Storm's crew moved into the penthouse of the Texas Commerce Building in 1998, they took one look through the wall-to-wall windows that afforded a panoramic view of Dallas and let out a gruesome, unanimous sigh.

The architects immediately set to work, installing stylish spoilers on top of the cubicles. But that proved hardly dark enough to suit the gamers' finicky tastes. Instead, the builders of anticipated first-person shooter Daikatana whipped out staple guns and nailed thick sheets of black felt over every cube in the office.

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.

Next page | She's not in Kansas anymore -- Stevie "Killcreek" Case takes on Romero and lands in Playboy