5/31/2023 0 Comments Rush team 2 hackAs 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. 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. "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. "Eww," he says, as I burst into human gravy, "that hurt!" As my character haplessly peeks out from behind a nearby column, Romero flicks his wrist and unleashes a lethal blast of iris lightning. 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.
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