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The man does not exaggerate. That skyscraper, one of the most prestigious in town, has a full tank of old money and gray suits, which is to say, oil has been very, very good to Dallas. The place crawls with bankers and lawyers and investment drones, and the ones with the biggest spurs can take the elevator up to the 39th floor and sip Jack Daniels at the Petroleum Club.
The vid kids have to go downstairs to get to the Petroleum Club. ION Storm, the hottest name in what the industry calls 3-D shooter games, rents the penthouse suite on the 54th and 55th floors, with nothing but clouds and glass for a ceiling. When they first started riding the elevators, says company president Hall, 33, the suits "thought we were delivery boys."
"There isn't a meeting where we don't just look at each other and laugh," says Todd Porter, the oldest of the four owners at 38. The four, who worked for different companies in the Dallas area and decided just 1 1/2 years ago to do their own thing, attracted an initial investment of $13 million and now have $25 million behind them, by Porter's count.
It's a story of entrepreneurial hustle, talent and smarts. But you could easily accuse these guys of helping create a generation of slugs and violence-addicted sociopaths.
So let's accuse them.
Not so fast, they say. What about television, the movies, the nightly news? A kid who can't tell the difference between blowing up a computerized freak and taking Dad's high-powered rifle out to the schoolyard, says marketing director Mike Breslin, 25, might not have got the best parenting.
True enough. So how might a parent reconnect with a child whose brain has been sucked out of his head by a gory video game?
"Maybe a parent can death-match with their kid to share an activity," says Romero.
We should have stayed in that RV.
Keep one thing in mind, says Breslin. All ION Storm's games, several of which will be released in the next 1 1/2 years, are about good vs. evil. And about character growth. "Splattered blood and flying meat" just make the experience more real, says Romero.
Wouldn't you love to be a fly on the wall when these guys go down to the Petroleum Club for cocktails?
Though each of the four owners had been majorly successful before this venture, it was Romero's rock star-level status as co-creator of the revolutionary games Doom and Quake that generated the buzz, marked Dallas as the blood-and-gore capital and drew talent from around the world. Talent that is now assembled in a Mad Max postindustrial setting where the refrigerators are packed with soft drinks, the food is free, and with several lounges and sack centers. Why go home at all?
"We've all slept here," says boy-genius programmer Joey Liaw, 19, who deferred a scholarship to Stanford to work here. In one year, he says, he's made enough money to cover two years at Stanford, which he says costs $32,000 a year.
"I'll call the office at 4 in the morning, and half my team is here," says Porter, who has a pillow on the sofa in his office. In the death march leading to a deadline on a game Porter had to finish early in June, his 20-member crew worked seven days a week for six months.
Without complaint.