The freedom fighter rushes through the metallic gorge, taking cover behind a flaming armored vehicle as a rebel opens fire on him from a turret tower straight ahead. Out of ammunition and low on health, the player pulls out his massive, flat-faced maul and prepares for a last, desperate charge.

From his position, he rolls past two enemies and lands at the base of the tower. He brings the maul above his head and bears down on a support, immediately he rolls to another leg and slashes at it. With a loud ting that emanates through the gorge, the tower collapses on itself, teetering onto the cliffside and falling onto the helpless enemies in an explosive inferno.

Scenes like this are common in “Red Faction: Guerrilla,” a video game developed by Volition Inc. in Champaign. The company has been the industry’s pioneer of games with fully destructible worlds since the idea’s inception, and at the forefront of Volition’s destruction engine is senior programmer Eric Arnold.

“When we first proposed the idea, they said, ‘No, you’re crazy, that will never run fast enough,’” Arnold said as he sat in front of his computer monitors displaying layers of code. “It took a lot of tricks and optimizations to get that to run at a reasonable speed, but we did it.”

Arnold, 33, started his programming career in fifth grade and continued making small games throughout high school independently, eventually starting Michigan State’s first game development club, “Spartasoft,” with his friends. When he landed a job at Volition 11 years ago, he worked on several different projects until he eventually began working on “Red Faction: Guerrilla” as a destruction, stress and physics programmer.

“With a lot of games, it’s very important to know where the player is and where they can get to at any time,” Arnold said. “That’s impossible when you have destruction, because you can bust a hole through the wall and bypass your scripted sequence.”

Despite destruction’s complications, Arnold and his team integrated it into Red Faction, shooting the series ahead of competitors with a truly free-range, destructible world.

“It was a really fun problem to solve, I got to work with a lot of people and create something that nobody else has, at least to that scale,” Arnold said. “It’s definitely the thing that I would say I’m most proud of in my career so far.”

Arnold is currently off the destruction engine and is now a system architect for the Core Technology Group (CTG) at Volition where he is working on the engine for the company’s future games.

He first became interested in video games when he started playing the Atari 7200. That drove him to try to understand programming for himself. In high school, whenever he was confronted with a problem like organizing his CD collection, he’d create a utility program.

“I enjoy the challenge of translating my idea into a functioning program that does exactly what I want, and I know every bit about what it is doing and why,” he said.

To the side of Arnold, two shelves hung high off of the wall. An assortment of Bionicles, a Samuri Jack figure and other quirky memorabilia crowded every square inch, but one item stood out — a massive Nerf gun.

Arnold isn’t the type of person who settles for a slow, clunky Nerf gun straight from a Walmart shelf. He took one apart, put in heavier gaskets and thicker springs and made it into a weapon that would dominate in an office Nerf gun war.

Arnold’s wife Christy, 30, said he puts his talents for tinkering to other uses than refitting Nerf guns and programming video games.

“He’s always working on some kind of project around the house,” she said, referencing their home theatre/man-cave as an example. “He’s very handy and very meticulous.”

Arnold towers above his desk at 6’4,” and his well-built frame doesn’t give the impression that he would spend all day in front of a computer screen. But he doesn’t. Outside of work, he says he barely ever plays video games.

Instead of pouring hours into “Skyrim,” he picks up the controller for a short time to see what his competition is doing. Christy and their 19-month-old son occupy too much of his time for him to play seriously, so he usually settles for “Book of Heroes” on his iPhone during his free time.

He is in a growing market of gamers who, by choosing to play with his son and mobile devices instead of consoles, is reshaping the face of the gaming industry.

“Games that have hundreds of people and million dollar budgets, those are always going to exist, it’s like blockbuster movies,” Arnold said, citing “Call of Duty” and “Assassin’s Creed” as examples. “Mid-grade games are the ones that are getting hurt the most because a lot of people are moving to mobile stuff for casual purposes.”

Walking through Volition’s massive, shining glass doors and into the office’s spacious lobby with shelves lined with an assortment of quirky memorabilia, it’s obvious that Volition isn’t a struggling mid-tier developer.

Located on the second floor of a relatively new building, right above KoFsuion, the office occupies one of the most desirable spots in downtown Champaign.

This is an office where Nerf gun wars and kegerators are common. Where workers can decide to play ping pong in the arcade room or eat lunch over a friendly game of “Magic the Gathering.”

“It’s a great group of people to work with, very similar age and interests so it’s fun to hang out with them,” he said. “For the most part, it’s a relaxed, laid-back environment.”

When Volition’s California-based parent company THQ Inc. declared bankruptcy on Dec. 19, Volition’s future was uncertain. However, Koch Media bought it in late January and Glynis Barker, CTG project management director, is optimistic about Volition’s future under their new parent company.

“THQ just didn’t manage their business very well. Others have shown that if you manage the business correctly, you can make it profitable,” Barker said. “I think (being bought by Koch) is going to be really good and positive for us.”

Arnold expressed similar feelings in regards to creative control, something THQ sometimes limited.

“They (Koch Media) are really excited about it, and they’re wanting to give us the proper backing, to the extent that they can anyway,” Arnold said. “It sounds like they know what they don’t know, they want to leave us in charge of the creative decisions and they understand that we know how to make games.”

Austin can be reached at [email protected] and @austinkeating3.