John Romero: Battle Star

The offices of Ion Storm resemble a high-tech shantytown set down in the penthouse suite of Dallas' Chase Tower. The crew of 20 unshaven programmers has been working 14-hour days for the last six months. In the employee lounge, a handwritten sign hangs on one of the videogame machines: ''No more Tekken 3 until Daikatana ships.''

Now on its fifth lead programmer, wildly over budget, and more than two years late, Daikatana, the much-hyped title from the much-hyped designer John Romero, has become the Waterworld of computer videogames. Its publisher and financial backer, Eidos Interactive, has stepped in, hoping to introduce a little adult supervision at Romero's home for wayward gameboys. And in the wake of Columbine, the Doom creator's short-lived romance with the mainstream press has turned rancid.

All the 32-year-old game designer cares about right now is getting his game out the door: Daikatana is finally due to hit store shelves in December. ''There's been a lot of pressure to release [it] earlier,'' says Romero. ''But there was no way I was going to put out a game with my name on it and have it look bad.''

It doesn't. In fact, Daikatana deftly mixes the action of a kill-everything-that-moves game with an epic plotline that spans four time periods and features cunning monsters and intelligent sidekicks. But will anyone care? After all the troubles at Ion Storm, can Romero recapture an audience that has plenty of other thumb candy to choose from? ''At this point, there is no way that Daikatana can live up to the hype,'' says Vince Broady, editorial director for the popular online gaming magazine GameSpot.com.

Widely credited as the creative force behind megahits like Doomand Quake, Romero helped define the genre known as the first-person shooter, a reinvention of the videogame as hair-raisingly violent action movie. In a market where half a million copies makes a hit, Doom and Quake sold an estimated 5.9 million combined, making instant multimillionaires of Romero and his dozen partners at his former company, id Software. With that reputation, Romero quit in 1996 to take a rumored $13 million advance against future royalties from Eidos, publisher of the Lara Croft vehicle Tomb Raider. Romero envisioned a DreamWorks of computer gaming called Ion Storm, and with his trademark swagger, he promised to release Daikatana by Christmas 1997 — in half the time it normally takes to create an original game.

The gaming magazines had always adored him, but now the mainstream press came calling. They loved his long hair and his rock star's taste for expensive toys. Romero, a military brat who never finished college, owns six cars, including a Ferrari Testarossa and a bright yellow Humvee. His domestic life was suitably baroque (with two kids from his first marriage and one from his second, the recently separated designer now dates Stevie Case, a statuesque Ion employee, professional Quakeplayer, and soon-to-be Playboy and Details model). The ''Quentin Tarantino of computer-game megaviolence'' (as GQ called him) seemed to be living the life every computer gamer dreamed about. And Ion happily fanned the flames with a 1997 ad that became infamous in gaming circles: ''John Romero wants to make you his bitch.'' Observers started to wonder what was really brewing in Dallas: a computer game or a Frankenstein of hype?