According to Case, a disturbing incident provided yet another reminder of her vulnerability as a woman in the male-dominated world of gaming.
Since moving to Dallas, Case had become friends with an older guy in the industry who helped her navigate the nascent business and plan her career. But the man was “always just skirting the edge of inappropriate in a way that felt uncomfortable,” she says, making comments about how easily he could fall in love with her, despite the fact that he was married. He frequently told her to lose weight because it would help her image.
Mindful of his power and influence, Case tried to shrug it off. One afternoon, Case alleges, he took her for lunch at his usual spot to talk business and strategy. Afterward, they headed out to his car so he could drive her home. Once the doors were shut, the mood changed. He asked her to pull down her pants, she says, and show him her vagina. He “commanded me, ‘Show me what you’ve got. I want to see it,’” Case says. “He just would not let up,” she says.
As she sat frozen, she says, she thought, “If I’m not the cool girl who goes along, what am I going to give up? Am I going to be on the outside? That was my fear. It felt like one thing on this continuum of constantly being expected to expose myself or otherwise be on display. I just thought that’s how the world was. The story I told myself was: I’m strong and I am a survivor and I just do what I have to do.” So she did, pulling down her pants in the car in silence as he watched. “He didn’t touch me but I definitely felt, like, trapped,” she says, “It just felt like he was sort of leering at me.” Then she pulled her pants back up and said she had to go.
In July 1997, Case scored her biggest win yet: a job as a game tester at Romero’s new studio, Ion Storm. With a multimillion-dollar publishing deal from Eidos, the British behemoth behind the best-selling Tomb Raider franchise, Romero had made it to the top of the industry, and downtown Dallas. Ion leased the 22,500-square-foot, glass-ceilinged penthouse of the Texas Commerce Building, and transformed it into what a press release called “the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory of Gaming!” When Case stepped out of the emerald-green elevator doors onto the penthouse floor, she felt more like Dorothy entering Oz. As clouds floated above the glass ceiling, she passed vintage arcade games, a movie theater, a custom deathmatching arena with big shiny screens, and a snack room stacked with Bawls soda, Milk Duds, and Cup-O-Noodles. Throughout the maze of corrugated steel cubicles, at every oversized monitor, were her people: gamers, dozens of them. Though she was outnumbered by guys as usual, she felt as much a part of their team as ever. “I thought it was fucking awesome,” she says.
But as the sun overhead turned to darkness, a harsher reality set in. With nearly 100 employees, millions spent on renovations, and no game release in sight, Romero’s team was working 12-hour days, six days a week. That explained the sleeping bags and pillows under the desks, which I saw myself when I was there profiling Romero for Salon. Case returned with a packed suitcase and camped under her desk for two weeks. She felt determined to prove herself, and land her dream job as a game designer.
But the pressure kept building. For a year, Romero had been endlessly touting Daikatana’s impending release. This included a notorious ad in major gaming magazines that warned, “John Romero’s About to Make You His Bitch.” Romero’s spokesperson said he disavowed the ad at the time, saying it wasn’t his idea and that he regrets not preventing it. But the damage was done. It wasn’t the misogyny of the ad that bothered gamers so much. It was the macho posturing about an increasingly delayed game that was starting to feel like vaporware. The man who’d perfected the art of trash-talking in gaming now found himself being savaged by the gaming bloggers and press.
Just before Thanksgiving 1998, Case and few others took Romero to P.F. Chang’s for an intervention of sorts. “We heard a rumor that your entire Daikatana team is going to leave tomorrow,” Case told him. The next day, they did—a devastating blow that made the haters hate even harder. But it had one silver lining: Case got promoted to a job designing levels for the game. “I was ecstatic,” she says. “I felt like this brotherhood of designers had accepted me.”
Romero was interested in more than her design skills. Amid all the strife inside the company, they’d grown close. Both were gamers at heart, and both were familiar with life under siege. He was 31 now, with a newborn daughter, but his troubles at work spilled into tensions at home, and he and his wife soon separated.
One night, he and Stevie went to dinner. “We were sitting on a curb after eating dinner or something, having some wine, and he kissed me,” she says. “That was it.” Case and Romero tried to keep their relationship secret at work while they raced to get Daikatana out the door. “He was supersmart, hilarious, goofy,” Case says, “The whole thing that made him a gamer—the intelligence, and the wit, and the playfulness—that was just so fun. I felt like it was somebody that got me very deeply, good and bad. Everything about who I was.”
Their bond grew stronger in the face of mounting adversity. In January 1999, as I later reported in Masters of Doom, the Dallas Observer published a scathing exposé of Ion Storm’s work culture drawn from leaked internal emails. “The place where the ‘designer’s vision is king’ has turned into a toxic mix of prima donnas and personality cults,” the article declared. Then, in April, it emerged that the Columbine High School shooters had been avid fans of Doom. A national uproar over violent video games ensued.
By the time Case and Romero showed up to that year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, the annual gaming convention in Los Angeles, the baggy-jeaned KillCreek of before was no longer. Standing arm in arm with Romero, in his black leather pants, mesh black shirt, and long silver chain, Case had completed her transition from corn-fed tomboy to video-game vixen. Dressed in a tight baby-blue shirt and black pants, she’d dyed her hair blonde, dropped 50 pounds, and surgically enlarged her breasts. To the hordes of autograph-seeking fans at the expo, Romero and Case had become gaming’s It couple.