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A Red Faction cigar is encased next to the video game at Violition in downtown Champaign on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008. (Patrick Fahrner)

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Chris Allen loves video games. He remembers a slack-jawed, younger self playing the Atari 2600 at the Topeka Wal-Mart. He worked in two arcades through college.

“Games are amazing,” he said, wide-eyed, reclining in the offices of Volition, Inc., a video game studio in downtown Champaign.

Allen came to Champaign with his wife, who is pursuing a doctorate. He joined the company as tester almost six years ago and now he is a designer for Saints Row 2, the sequel to a 2006 hit. He refers to himself as an advocate for the player. More often than not, players want more.

“We’re pushing the boundaries,” he said “But I’ll have to wait on the official word to tell you the full ambitions of our design.”

You can’t blame him for secrecy. Games aren’t just for kids anymore, judging from the original Saints Row’s mature rating, as well as its sales: 1.5 million copies worldwide. U.S. retail sales of video games totaled $12.5 billion in 2007.

The boys who grew up feeding quarters into the nearest Galaga machine are still gaming, on $400 to $600 machines with many times the computing power of the games of yore. The gamers’ average age is nearing 30. The “hardcore” gamer is in his late 20s.

“We are the core gamer,” said Volition vice president Dan Cermak.

Today’s blockbuster video games equal their film counterparts in many ways. Games take years to create, as well as millions of dollars. 100 people working at least 40 hours a week for two to five years turns into a lot of cash.

In the original Saints Row, the player was an unnamed new recruit in the 3rd Street Saints, a gang in the fictional American city of Stilwater. A crooked police force and a corrupt mayoral race unraveled the Saints’ plan to take over the city. In the sequel, the player will attempt to retake the city.

Stilwater has problems like every American city. The docks say San Francisco or Baltimore. The factories say Detroit. The skyline says New York. Instead of bricks and mortar, Stilwater is made of polygons and C++ code. The player can surf on the hood of a car or steal it. Stilwater is the work of designers, writers, sound and graphic artists, programmers and play-testers. They want to provide a playground for the thug in all of us.

“More people go into creating a video game than building a building,” said Andrew Frederiksen, a quality assurance supervisor.

Vice President Dan Cermak said he likes his designers to think about games at an atomic level: simple, yet deep. Volition plunged into the sandbox in 2003, about the same time Cermak came on board. Volition wanted to become the industry leader in open-world gaming.

In a linear game, the developer fixes the path a player might take from A to B. In an open world, the player can walk through the whole city, said programmer Frank Reese. Saints Row 2’s open-ended nature requires technological heavy lifting. Reese blinks to remember whether a recent milestone was a million or a billion lines of code.

The first sandbox games were Will Wright titles like SimCity 2000, the gaming auteur who would go on to create the massively successful The Sims franchise. Those titles were more like tools or toys, without the goal-oriented structure of conventional games. Open-world titles like Saints Row 2 bridge that gap.

“If you want to blaze your own trail, feel free; come back whenever you’re ready,” Chris Allen said.

The growth of the industry has encouraged specialization. With multi-million dollar stakes, studios must be thorough in evaluating their product. Over 100 quality assurance testers will put Saints Row 2 through the gauntlet, checking every weapon, every bullet and all 30,000 audio clips streamed into the game.

“Forty hour weeks are a minimum,” said Aaron Koontz, who runs the department, “Around deadline, you might see a 24-hour shift in there.”

Goateed, ear-and-lip-ringed, Koontz is careful to give his workers at least one day off a week. He came over in October from one of the industry giants, Electronic Arts in Orlando. He was once the man responsible for entering the ratings into the Madden NFL football games. The Madden franchise sells about 2 million copies a year.

“Volition has that small-studio feel with a big-studio budget,” he said.

Roje Smith is a multi-player producer. The Bronx native wants to deliver a mode that no one has played before. He can’t let all the secrets out yet, “but once we put the due diligence in, it’s going to be a pretty hot mode.”

The Saints Row franchise is firmly tongue-in-cheek. Stilwater is not going to have Rikers. It’s more Don’t be a Menace than Boyz n the Hood. When Smith thinks gangster, he thinks gritty, not funny. If some of the things that happened in the game happened in his neighborhood — a feature of the first Saints Row was enhanced drive-by shooting control — he’d be concerned. He said that in the end, it’s still a video game. It’s about fun.

“Trying to find that balance is a delicate matter,” said Chris Allen, “We have to evaluate where we’re at and ask, ‘Is this funny, is this too scatological?’ Does this put the game in the hands of gamers who will appreciate our sense of humor, our game-play?”

For Allen, a game’s birth is a profound process. Slack-jawed play-testers will play through ideas he had long ago. What he thought would be good is good. There’s a chance millions of gamers will be playing his thoughts.

“I think everybody here, programmers, artists, designers, management, testers, audio; it’s such a team effort,” he said, “Everyone’s hoping their elements (fit) together like Lego pieces and form this great product.”