Growing Pains

Sitting at a banquette in the outdoor courtyard of a dark Los Angeles nightclub, Gabriel Jones, dressed all in black, and his friend Wendy, wearing a black camisole and jeans, are hunched over their drinks. Behind them, a lamp grows from a cinder-block planter, blossoming into red bulbs at the end of long steel stems. Jones has brought Wendy here to ask her how he can balance the demands of his career against those of his love life. In this weird little cavern of a club, he's at the heart of the new economy's emotional spin cycle, where labor and love continually merge with and break apart from work and leisure. He's a one-man referendum on the trade-offs that everyone faces in a hyperfast-growing organization. Work or life? Growth or comfort?

All of which is to say that this is a business meeting, although neither of its participants knows it. Jones, a 27-year-old video-game producer, has just been asked by Wendy if he plans to move to Vancouver for three months. The purpose of the trip would be to oversee one of the creative studios contracted by THQ during the throes of crunch time -- that sleepwalking state in the final months and weeks before a game is released, when it is tested and refined around the clock. A thousand programming bugs need to be fixed. The pressures are immense. People on the Vancouver team have had nervous breakdowns. Others have quit. To finish developing the game, Jones needs to live full time in Canada over the summer. If he goes to Vancouver, Jones isn't sure what Krista, his new girlfriend, will do. Will she wait for him to return to Los Angeles?

"So what's your opinion on Krista?" Jones asks Wendy.

"How long have you been seeing her?" Wendy asks.

"About a month," he says.

Krista is in her mid-twenties, has long red hair and blue eyes, and is working toward a degree in forensic psychology. She's bright and beautiful, and she adores Jones. When they go out, she sits beside him and strokes his hand. It's not hard to understand why: A few inches taller than six feet, tanned, seemingly at ease with everyone, he looks like a young Travolta swaggering through Brooklyn.

"Have you slept with her?" Wendy asks.

"Not yet," he answers.

"Well, you're running out of time."

Growth in No Time Flat

Running out of time is a continuous state of being for someone who works at a company that is as successful and as fast-growing as THQ Inc. Headquartered on a sunny slope of the San Fernando Valley, in Calabasas Hills, California, in a glass-walled building that is surrounded by low, green hills and that offers no signs except one -- the name of the building's chief tenant and owner, PIP Printing -- THQ is about 20 minutes northwest of Hollywood. The company is still in stealth mode: It isn't famous, but it's on the verge of fame.

Last year, THQ shot up to third place on Fortune magazine's list of the fastest-growing companies in America: It earned $302 million in revenue and $33 million in net income. In a little more than five years, it has gone from 43 employees to 300. In the process, it has enjoyed a compound annual-growth rate of 156% in earnings, with revenue skyrocketing from around $13 million only six years ago to more than $300 million last year. It is currently the nation's fourth-largest video-game publisher, behind Nintendo, Sony PlayStation, and Electronic Arts. Over the past five years, what once was a funky little group of creative people has become a video-game factory, popping out roughly 13 new titles every quarter.

If everything goes according to the company's plans, it will continue its profitable growth and will double in size every three to five years. That rate of growth has already transformed THQ, and as the pace quickens, so will the changes. Old rules get tossed, time runs out, work life and personal life converge into a new and unrecognizable hybrid, and corporate gestures that used to mean one thing can mean the opposite. What once was a cozy family where everyone knew everything, where email was superfluous because all events were public knowledge, is now a corporation where silence has replaced easy, informal communications. To dispel that unintentional, inevitable silence, all kinds of processes have been put in place: reporting systems, voice mail, every form of technological knowledge sharing. And yet those processes don't entirely do the trick. Jones, for example, seems to feel as if he is overlooked by higher-ups within the organization. Although nothing could be further from the truth, that feeling is an inevitable consequence of rapid growth.

The psychology of corporate growth drives Jones's almost-predictable response. He has been trying to break through the organizational silence at THQ and prompt his superiors to tell him what he's worth. In late March, Jones handed in his resignation. It was a test: an organizational suicide threat. About two weeks later, company officials replied by asking him to fly to Vancouver in order to finish the Aidyn Chronicles -- one of the longest, most intensive projects that the company has ever undertaken, a game that Jones has been producing since it was first developed in 1998.