CentOS 5 Server :: Creating New Service Scripts - PidFile?

I am new to linux, running a brand new centos 5.2 server. One application I want to use it for is to serve as a network host for a game my friends and I enjoy. Normally, to run the game in host mode you call the binary and pass it a port number (along with other options). To host a second instance of the game, same thing different port, you get the idea.

After doing that the binary runs in your window and dumps to stdout, so if you want it to run 24/7 you have to come up with your own strategy like nohup. Fair enough, now, I'm trying to coax the game into restarting automatically upon reboot. The most correct way to do this seemed to be to write a script for init.d so that's the road I traveled down. Now, to strain the metaphor, the pavement has ended and I'm stuck in the sand.

Here begin my questions:
I've been following the structure of other init.d scripts and I notice they all seem to call the function daemon() (contained in /etc/init.d/functions) to start their services. Looking at the structure of daemon() I see that you can pass it a user and a pidfile. The user part seems to work fine, but no pidfile is created. Let me be more specific.

Like the other scripts, I explicitly touch /var/lock/subsys/game-port on startup, which works fine. However, all of those other services seem to have a pidfile in /var/run and mine doesn't. They don't create it explicitly in their init.d script therefore I assume that some other process is creating the pidfile. At first I thought it would be the call to daemon(), since you have the option of passing it --pidfile, but that doesn't seem to work.

Are the services themselves creating the pidfile? If that's the case then I have more complications because the game binary apparently doesn't do this. Second question but probably related to the first. None of the other init.d scripts I looked at seem to do anything special to detach their services from a particular terminal session, therefore I didn't think that I would need to either.

Again I thought this was something the call to daemon() might accomplish, but either I'm wrong or I'm doing something wrong. I can probably work around this with nohup or appending '&' or something, but I'm just curious that other services like crond, sshd, named, etc., don't seem to do this. Are they determining this behavior from within the binaries themselves? I hope this is clear, as I said I'm new so I may not be getting all of the terminology correct.