Stevie Case just wanted to play with the boys. Late one night in the spring of 1997, the 20-year-old pulled up in a U-Haul van at her parents’ house in Olathe, Kansas, with a surprise. She was dropping out of the University of Kansas, taking her things, and moving to Dallas, where a burgeoning scene of video-game developers were churning out such hits as Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3-D. She used to dream of becoming the president of the United States, but no longer. Now she wanted to be a gamer.

Hard-core gamers already knew Case as KillCreek, the girl who beat legendary game designer John Romero at Quake, the chart-topping first-person shooter he himself had cocreated. In Texas, her conquest and sharpshooting skills scored her a sponsorship as the industry’s first professional female gamer. She soon found work as a game designer, working for Romero himself. Soon, they became a couple. And not just any couple but the Pam and Tommy of video games, influencers long before the advent of social media. But Case’s transformation from Kansas tomboy to Playboy model made her patient zero for the sexist harassment that continues to plague gaming today. “She was there when there were almost no women in the industry,” recalls Cliff Bleszinski, a designer of such blockbuster games as Unreal and Gears of War and author of the upcoming memoir Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games. “The amount of shit she got was just tremendous,” he says

Today, Case is a successful 46-year-old single mother and Silicon Valley executive. Two decades after she left the gaming industry with no explanation, she’s finally breaking her silence about the abuse she suffered during her KillCreek years. She’s doing it, in part, because, as she texted me in March, “Little has changed.”

The $200 billion video-game industry is facing a protracted and costly reckoning. It began in 2014 with Gamergate, the notorious campaign of online harassment against female developers and critics. Anti-feminists on 4chan, the anonymous message board, targeted industry women, publicizing their personal details and deluging them with threats of violence and sexual assault. Together, they created a disinformation machine of conspiracy theories and Twitter bots that would help lay the groundwork for the alt-right internet. Seven years later, Riot Games, publisher of the multibillion-dollar franchise League of Legends, agreed to pay $100 million to settle a sexual harassment suit by California state agencies and current and former employees. One of the industry’s top publishers, Activision Blizzard, whose $68.7 billion acquisition by Microsoft is still pending, is embroiled in several high-profile sexual-harassment lawsuits related to its “pervasive frat boy workplace culture,” as it was described in a complaint filed last year by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. In March, a California federal judge approved an $18 million settlement between Activision Blizzard and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

And still, the harassment continues. On March 24, the day I was in San Francisco to interview Case, video-game level designer Beth Beinke tweeted about getting sexually harassed at a party for women in gaming at the annual Game Developers Conference that week. “I told a man last night it wasn’t okay to touch me,” Beinke wrote. The fact that the party was cosponsored by Activision made the incident especially enraging. “It was SHOCKING that they even held something like that,” Jessica Gonzalez, a former quality assurance tester for Activision, replied to Beinke. “They straight up set up a formula for predatory men to prey on aspiring/established women devs.”

Case hopes that sharing her experience will inspire others to do the same. “The more time I spent thinking about this, the more I felt like I have to tell this story, because it’s the right thing to do and it’s the truth,” she tells me one morning at the new waterfront home she shares with her teenage daughter and her divorced mother. Her hair, once bleached blonde, is back to its natural brown. She sips a Starbucks on her couch, barefoot in jeans and a green sweater, a smart ring sparkling on her hand. “The only way things change,” she says, “is if people tell these stories.”

It wasn’t easy being the only girl on the T-ball team in Olathe, a suburb of Kansas City. One boy called Case a “feminazi gorilla.” Coaches wouldn’t let her take her turn as umpire. Families wanted her off the field. “The parents were all mad,” says her mother, Stevana, a retired social worker.

“I didn’t understand why I couldn’t do those things,” says Case. “It just seemed like: ‘This is what I want to do. Why is this such a problem for everybody?’”

In what would become a pattern, the obstacles only made her swing harder. In high school, she was voted athlete of the year and class president. With the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union, she successfully sued the state of Kansas in federal court for banning an LGBTQ+ themed book (see Case v. Unified School Dist.). Always a high achiever, she even earned a trip to the White House to meet President Bill Clinton, whose job she had her sights set on. “I always wanted to be president,” she says. “Nothing lower.”

All it took to derail that plan was one video game. As a freshman at the University of Kansas, in 1996, she was put on a dorm floor for honors students. The brainy boys she met there invited her to play a new computer game that came out that summer: Quake.

Growing up, Case had spent hours playing Nintendo with her younger brother Andy. “She would just dominate at Mario,” he recalls. But she’d never seen anything like this. Made by id Software, the independent Texas-based studio known for its first-person shooters Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom, Quake had taken the gaming world by storm, as I chronicle in my 2003 book, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Built an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture. It even featured a pulsing original soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails, whose singer, Trent Reznor, was a Doom fanatic.

In the single-player version of Quake, gamers raced through dark, labyrinthian hellscapes and blasted monsters into chunks. But the game’s holiest innovation was to bring multiplayer “deathmatching” online. Now, players anywhere in the world could hunt each down and blast each other into bloody giblets. The breakthrough paved the way for every multiplayer shoot-’em-up since, from Halo to Call of Duty and Fortnite.

The first time Case careened through the mazes blasting her shotgun, “it was really fast, and you felt like you were flying through that world,” she says. “And then when you added the ability to compete and beat other people, it just felt really addictive.” The gamers she deathmatched against knew her as KillCreek, a name she’d borrowed from a local grunge band because she thought it sounded fierce. Before long, KillCreek was pulling all-nighters with her team of geeky Quake bros, who called themselves Impulse 9. “I was all about the rockets,” she says, “and blowing shit up.”

I first met Case in the fall of 1996, when I traveled to K.U. to write an article for Spin about “the dawn of cybersports.” It felt like glimpsing some strange cyberpunk future. Dozens of gamers from around the country had road-tripped to the university’s campus in Lawrence, Kansas, to compete in a nonstop deathmatch tournament fueled by Jolt cola and Domino’s pizza. Twenty years old at the time, Case had a short brown bob and wore baggy jeans and a K.U. jersey. I found her to be gregarious and confident. Yes, she was the only woman in the lineup, but that’s where the similarities to her T-ball days in Olathe ended. “I had always felt like the weirdo outlier,” she recalls. “I didn’t feel that way in that community. I felt like a part of this team. I felt like, ‘Oh, these are my people.’”

Among the gamers, there was no one more revered than the master of Quake himself, John Romero. With his twisted humor, long dark mane of heavy-metal hair, and fly yellow Ferrari, Romero was gaming’s first rock star. Though he had a loving mother, he’d grown up in a broken and abusive home, beaten by his stepfather for playing too many video games. A hypercreative autodidact, he taught himself to code and began publishing games in his teens. By his mid-20s, he’d become a self-made multimillionaire who, along with his cofounders at id Software, personified Geek Power at a time when it still felt dangerous to be a nerd.

The “egos at id,” as Wired billed Romero and his cofounders in a 1996 cover story, were revered by luminaries including Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak for their visceral games and technical achievements. They were hailed as the Beatles of gaming—though, with their long hair and violent games, they were more into Dokken. When Romero accidentally locked himself in his office, cofounder John Carmack busted down the door with a $5,000 custom-built battle axe. “They were just these ultrafamous rock stars who were living this unimaginable life and were wild and out of control,” Case recalls, “and they had done it without following a traditional path.”

In the winter of 1997, Case’s path led her to The Romero, as he was known on the online forums where gamers traded gossip, tips, and insults. He had recently left id Software, after an acrimonious split, to start his own competing studio, Ion Storm, where he planned to make his most epic and bombastic shooter game yet: Daikatana. Prone to hyperbole, Romero had his detractors, but he remained a gamer’s gamer, an affable and accessible creator who readily challenged fans. One day, his friend Don MacAskill, who ran a Quake Internet Relay Chat channel, told him about this fearsome player named KillCreek. (MacAskill, who went on to found the image-sharing service SmugMug, is one of many in the Quake community who went on to become a Silicon Valley heavyweight.) “Hey, I know a girl that can kick your ass,” MacAskill recalls taunting Romero at the time. “No way,” Romero replied. “Never happen.” Game on.

Romero agreed to a deathmatch. Case road-tripped to Texas to play the biggest game of her life. “It was just like Mecca,” she says. “It was like, ‘I can’t believe not only are we going to go to Dallas, but we actually get to meet these people.’” At 29, nine years older than Case, Romero was married to his second wife and had three children. But he still looked like a brash young metal lord, with his long hair, tight black jeans, silver rings, and coterie of hangers-on. “This is the girl I was telling you about,” MacAskill told Romero, who chuckled like Beavis as he shook her hand. “He had his whole posse, but he seemed socially awkward,” she says. “It just felt like this god, this rock-star alien, and I’m just some person from Kansas. I had no idea if I could beat this guy or not.”

Romero’s awkwardness melted away as he took the controls of his machine and began to compete. He played the game he himself designed like a real sport: shouting, wisecracking, cursing, and coining his own lexicon of trash talk, including his trademarked catchphrase, “Suck it down!” The two players were a surprisingly good match. But KillCreek’s tenacity could get the better of her. “If a door was closed, I’d try to keep pushing through instead of looking behind,” she says. The Romero won.

After the victory, he returned to his geeky self, complimenting her skills and telling her he was ready anytime for a rematch. Back in Kansas a few weeks later, however, Case was getting trashed again—this time online, for anyone to see. A taunting message appeared on his company’s website, signed by “John Romero,” that invoked her gender. “I didn’t know that KillCreek was a female, and she wanted to trash me in a Deathmatch in front of everybody. Presumably so she could blather all over the Internet (much like myself) that she destroyed Romero,” the message read. “Can’t let a little girl get away with that.”

Word had it that he’d posted something even more misogynistic but then removed it after some complaints. In fact, as Case discovered, it wasn’t quite taken down. It was just hidden in black text against the black background, as a kind of sexist Easter egg. Case clicked the screen and highlighted the message, which read: “Don’t ever let a little girl beat you in Deathmatch. Deathmatch is a man’s game and women will never fully understand it. Not with a million rockets up their *&@#’s.”

Through a spokesperson, Romero denies posting both messages. According to the rep, they were posted without Romero’s advance knowledge or approval.

After a lifetime playing with guys, Case says, “I was so used to that stuff. I just kind of rolled my eyes at it, like, whatever.” In fact, it made her only more determined to fight him again. She accepted his rematch offer, and he took her bet: The loser had to create an online shrine to the winner. When she returned a few weeks later, in the spring of 1997, the challenge had gone viral in the gamer community.

As journalists watched and cameras snapped, Romero began “trash-talking pretty hard,” MacAskill says. Romero made “a sexist comment, something about my gender,” Case says, “I was trying not to show it, but I was really upset.” As the tirade went on, she felt increasingly isolated. “It was very lonely,” she says, “I’m hearing him say this running sexist commentary, and it’s like something snapped in my brain. It was just this moment of ‘Fuck this, this is not happening.’ So I went on a rampage.” In a statement, the spokesperson for Romero said that while trash talk was a “regular part” of gaming matches in the 1990, he “used language at that time during matches that he would not find acceptable today. He is apologetic if he said anything in ‘trash talk’ that upset anyone. That was never his intention.”

In an explosion of bullets and pixels, Case fought back—and won. As MacAskill remembers it, Romero reacted to losing in a style more worthy of his reputation. “He grabbed a hammer that was sitting next to his desk and just started beating on his keyboard. The keys were spraying all over the office,” MacAskill says. “Then he just yanked it out of his computer, threw it in the corner, unboxed a brand-new keyboard, and set it on the desk.” (Through his spokesperson, Romero stated he had “no recollection of this incident” and denied reacting in this way.)

Case says Romero made good on the shrine. “She beat my azz, smacked me down and she totally deserves the win, she’s an awesome player,” a post on the Ion Storm site read. “Maybe someday I will learn the secret of her master ability, or maybe next time I will, uh, eat some food before playing. :)” On the next page was an image of Case in a field of flowers and Romero on his knees begging like a boy for his sundae, “Put some cream on it, mommie!”

Romero’s spokesperson said the shrine was not created or posted by him: “The insinuation that the ‘shrine’ was at John Romero’s behest (and that he posted it) is untrue and denied.”

The win made KillCreek a gamer goddess. “It put her on the international stage, and showed that there are really talented women gamers out there,” MacAskill says. “And they’re hard-core enough to take on somebody like John and beat him—and not just beat him, but come back again and again, until she beat him.”

Soon after, Case dropped out of college, and drove away from her parents’ house to find a life in gaming in Dallas. “She left at 10 p.m. on her own,” her mother recalls. “I mean, who does that? A single female? I remember that scared me, but what are you going to do? That was our girl.”

It didn’t take long for Case’s bold move to pay off. In the summer of 1997, shortly after taking a tech support job, she got a dream offer she’d never even imagined: to become one of the industry’s first pro gamers. Romero had recently become chairman of the board of the Cyberathlete Professional League, which had just been founded in Dallas. Case, with her infamous win over him, made for the perfect Cinderella story and star.

With sponsorships from a computer mouse manufacturer and a joystick maker, as well as a $1,000 monthly stipend from the CPL, Case became an important early evangelist for esports.

She felt like she and Romero were helping to create a groundbreaking new form of entertainment. “We were all at the time thinking this is going to be a real sport someday. ‘This is going to be on ESPN, this is going to be in the Olympics,’” she says.

That feeling of camaraderie, however, was soon dampened by a toxic strain of sexism in the industry. In September, Case flew to Burbank, California, to compete in the first all-female Quake tournament. It had been organized by a local gamer who told The New York Times she was afraid to reveal her full name because of the harassment faced by female gamers. She said she had received hundreds of demeaning emails a day, some containing disturbing images and even threats to track down her location. “There’s a group of male players who want to keep it a boys’ club,” she told the Times. “The percentage of women in gaming is so small.”

Under the circumstances, Case’s willingness to put herself out there was as striking as her deathmatching skills. “She had no problems with going front and center and saying, ‘Yeah, this is what I do. This is what I enjoy. I’m here, and I’m going to play,’” says Vangie “Aurora” Beal, who led a team that called itself Clan PMS.

When it came time to play, Case, the favorite at the tournament, wore baggy jeans and a black Quake shirt, and slipped off her socks and shoes as she took her seat. “I only play barefoot,” she gamely told reporters. Case took home a trophy—and a garter signed by Carmack. She also earned a spot on Rolling Stone’s annual Hot List.

With her confidence and press clips growing, Case decided to challenge herself in a new way at the CPL’s first tournament in Dallas that Halloween: by vamping it up. “I was still quite shy,” she says, “so I was having fun, but really challenging myself to try to get out of my comfort zone.” For a costume contest, she stunned her fellow gamers by showing up in a tight black dress, a long pink wig, and a white boa. She won the top prize, and a computer graphics card, but she felt scrutinized in a way she hadn’t before. “That was sort of the start of people talking shit about me, or saying I was dumb or a bimbo or not in it for the right reasons,” she says. “It was very polarizing.”

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 1998, 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.

“Part of it was like, ‘Oh, okay, I’m getting noticed for being a woman. I’ll lean into being a woman. I’ve never done that before,’” she says. “I got a pretty positive response, and it was clear that was a thing with John. How I looked was clearly part of why he wanted to be with me and why he was interested in me.”

In the fall of 1999, Playboy magazine flew her to Chicago for a photo shoot. Case measured her life in victories. Under the bright lights in black lingerie, she felt she’d scored the biggest win of all. It had long been clear to her that the gamer world’s ideal woman was the vixen: buxom, blonde, dressed—and armed—to kill. So that’s who she became. “I won the game,” she says. “I figured out how to be the most womanly woman.”

“Just another slut that swallowed her way into her 15 minutes of fame...”

“Yeah she’s John Romero’s slut…”

“She sucked about 80 dicks to get into games…”

The reaction to Case’s Playboy spread among gamers was swift and violently negative. Hateful comments filled the online forums and chats, and one of the most popular gaming sites, Old Man Murray, made Case a recurring target. “Stevie’s obviously aware that Playboy is primarily a masturbation tool for men,” posted co-editor Erik Wolpaw, who now writes games for Valve, a top publisher. “I hope she won’t feel any less empowered when I respectfully request she include a few shots of her ass.”

The misogynistic heckling took a toll on Case. She was inundated with vile emails and threatening phone calls. “To have somebody call you at home on your landline phone to harass you and tell you you’re worthless and scream at you was really scary,” she says. The message felt clear: “The more I leaned into being beautiful, the more intense the harassment became, and the louder that message of ‘you are worthless’ came from the community.” On more than one occasion, she says, men in the industry touched her inappropriately, as if her implants were an invitation.

Case descended into bulimia. “There was constant commentary in that group of guys about women’s bodies and how they looked,” she says. “It was very clear to me what was expected.” She felt the expectation from, among others, her boss and boyfriend, John Romero. “He would try to counter it by saying what he viewed to be positive things, but they were also objectifying,” she says. During an interview for the gaming site Evil Ed, Romero, then 32, was asked what it was like to have sex with Case. He replied, “Just imagine having sex with a superhot model…. She’s so hot, we have to get back home as fast as possible almost every day! I was going to send some photos, but the attachment was too big.”

Via his spokesperson, Romero denied having expectations for Case’s appearance and said his response to Evil Ed “does not represent John Romero’s views or attitudes in 2022.”

In May 2000, Daikatana finally debuted, to abysmal sales and scathing reviews. Entertainment Weekly called it “a disaster of Waterworld-ian proportions.” As Case says, “It just felt awful. It felt like a death.” By the next summer, Ion Storm’s studio in Dallas—once the envy of the industry—had been shuttered. Case and Romero retreated to a country home in Quinlan, Texas, an hour east of Dallas, where they cofounded a mobile gaming company, Monkeystone Games, along with Romero’s old friend and id cofounder Tom Hall. When I visited while reporting Masters of Doom, it had the feel of a gamer’s country retreat. There was a log cabin, a private lagoon, and a family of wild peacocks they named after video games: Pong, Pooyan, and Phoenix.

But Case was outgrowing it all. Seven years earlier, she had been a wide-eyed, sharpshooting Kansas tomboy chasing an impossible dream. Now, having lived the fantasy and reality of life as a professional gamer, she was a 27-year-old woman who wanted more fulfillment than she felt Romero could provide. “He was like a perpetual 15-year-old boy,” she says. “That’s ultimately why I wanted to leave him. ‘I’m not 15 anymore. I want an adult life. I want to have dinner parties and adult friends.’ And he had no interest in that.”

Things between them came to a head one morning in May 2003. The spring had been hell, both professionally and personally. Monkeystone was too far ahead of the curve on mobile gaming, and the company was bleeding cash. During the long days and endless nights, Case began developing feelings for a producer at THQ Wireless, a mobile gaming company in Los Angeles that was working with Monkeystone. On a trip to L.A., she decided she had had enough. She told Romero she wanted to see other people, she says, and broke up with him.

Once she was back in Quinlan, Case says, she woke up to Romero glaring down at her. She says he started quoting lines from private messages she’d sent to Scott Born, a college friend whose band had inspired her nickname, Killcreek. In the messages, Case had described hooking up with the THQ Wireless producer. Because of an internet problem, Case had used one of Romero’s laptops to chat with Born over ICQ, an early instant-messaging system. What she didn’t know is that Romero had installed a keylogger that recorded every keystroke on the device.

In a statement, Romero’s spokesperson called Case’s account of their split “untrue.” He continued, “John Romero ended the relationship with Stevie Case after becoming aware of her infidelity.”

According to Case, Romero, having read details of her tryst, now used Case’s own words against her to prove she’d betrayed him. “He woke up, read it, went INSANE, called everyone at Monkeystone, FIRED ME,” she wrote in an ICQ message to Born soon after. “John has turned exceptionally scary. ‘I love you, but because I cant have you I am going to FUCK YOU UP!’ Crazy shit out of a movie!” (Through his spokesperson, Romero denied saying those words: “It is not terminology he would use.” He added that “despite his wholly natural and understandable upset,” Romero “was never physically aggressive towards Stevie Case—nor anyone else for that matter.”)

Case says Romero told her that he’d sent her chat transcripts, including all the intimate details she’d shared with Born, to the producer’s boss at THQ Wireless in an effort to get him fired. Case felt her stomach drop, sickened that her most intimate conversations could be used to blackball her friend. The producer “is in gaming,” she wrote Born. “It’s a world [Romero] knows how to fuck up.” As abruptly as she had pulled into Dallas in one U-Haul, Case drove another one out of Texas toward California. “I actually felt scared for my physical well-being,” she wrote Born from Los Angeles on May 21, shortly after she arrived. “I am just trying to take it as a learning opportunity, a big adventure. A chance to start over.”

According to Romero’s spokesperson, Case’s “affair with a client of Romero’s company…threatened commercial confidentiality and was clearly a conflict of interest for the business. As a result, John Romero felt obliged to inform [his] employer.”

A few years ago, at age 43, Stevie Case sought out the advice of an executive coach. She had fought her way to the top of Silicon Valley, made millions of dollars, and bought several homes. But as she told the coach, she still felt haunted by her battles as KillCreek—particularly in the wake of Gamergate

“I feel like I had PTSD,” she says, “I felt scared. I felt sick. I just wanted to, like, shut my computer and walk away from the internet. I felt terrified that it was going to happen again and I was just going to get re-victimized, and the harassment machine would turn back on.”

Case’s experiences in gaming weren’t her only source of trauma. She’d also been the victim of abuse in the years since leaving Romero. Her coach gave her one big piece of advice. “The thing she left me with was: ‘Your life is never going to be as hard again as it once was,’” Case tells me as she holds back tears. “‘So you can relax and stop operating from such a place of fear and scarcity. You’re safe now.’ Over the last couple of years, I have come to terms with that.”

With that acceptance came the courage to finally speak out in this story. “For the first time in my life,” she says, “I don’t feel afraid of being honest about my experience, because I’ve considered the worst-case scenarios and I can live with them. I’ve accomplished enough to feel I can achieve what I want to achieve now, regardless of what the internet thinks.”

Case recently reached out to Romero to see what he thinks about their past. Romero is 54 now, living in Galway, Ireland. He and his fourth wife, the BAFTA-winning game designer Brenda Romero, run their own development studio, Romero Games. Case never heard back.

Two weeks after the Game Developers Conference in March 2022, Case took a job as the chief revenue officer of Vanta, a computer security and compliance firm in San Francisco. Seventy-five percent of the company’s leadership team are women, including the CEO. Vanta became a unicorn in May after a $110 million raise, one of the year’s largest by a female-led team.

Though she no longer goes by KillCreek anymore, Case credits video games with building her confidence, honing her strategic thinking, and getting her to where she is today. She doesn’t play anymore, but she doesn’t hesitate when I ask if she still considers herself a gamer. “Hell yeah!” she says.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified Brenda Romero as John Romero’s third wife. She is his fourth wife.