“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
Maybe I should start by saying that I am definitely not a gamer — we’ve had several systems and countless games in the house over the years and the closest I’ve come to participating is singing along with The Beatles: Rock Band — but I found this book to be intensely interesting. With Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — about two childhood friends who have a falling out, but when they run into each other as college students, go on to create some of the most popular video games in the world — author Gabrielle Zevin takes a subject that I’m not that familiar with and makes it relatable, universal, and meaningful. Covering topics like sickness and disability, grief, poverty, abusive relationships, and evolving political landscapes, Zevin makes the case for people finding ways to live meaningful lives within invented worlds that are closed to them in reality, and not incidental to my enjoyment, she creates invented worlds that I found fascinating and artful. She has also created some truly compelling characters here, and when they hurt, I hurt; I cried more than once while reading this, and I love anything that touches this jaded heart. Four solid stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“Promise me, we won’t ever do this again,” Sadie said . “Promise me, that no matter what happens, no matter what dumb thing we supposedly perpetrate on each other, we won’t ever go six years without talking to each other. Promise me you’ll always forgive me, and I promise I’ll always forgive you.” These, of course, are the kinds of vows young people feel comfortable making when they have no idea what life has in store for them.
Sam and Sadie met in a children’s hospital in Los Angeles in the late 80s; a time when Super Mario was the newest game and your grandfather having a Donkey Kong arcade machine in his pizzeria was the height of cool to a fellow game nerd. Both kids were incredibly smart and driven, and although their intense friendship was initially short-lived, it wasn’t a total surprise that they would both end up going to college in Boston — with Sam studying Mathematics at Harvard and Sadie doing Computer Programming at MIT. The two bump into each other, Sadie gives Sam a cd-rom from her Game Design Seminar, and when he plays her game, Sam recognises the genius of Sadie’s creativity: he knows they must spend the summer break designing a game together. And the rest is gaming history: that first project, Ichigo, would go on to be the best-selling game of the year, launching a franchise and their company, Unfair Games. The writing style feels very sophisticated, with Zevin organically invoking the past, present, and future; sometimes in the same paragraph:
What was particularly amazing to Sam — and what became a theme of the games he would go on to make with Sadie — was how quickly the world could shift. How your sense of self could change depending on your location. As Sadie would put it in an interview with Wired, “The game character, like the self, is contextual.” In Koreatown, no one ever thought Sam was Korean. In Manhattan, no one had ever thought he was white. In Los Angeles, he was the “white cousin.” In New York, he was that “little Chinese kid.” And yet, in K-town, he felt more Korean than he ever had before. Or to put a finer point on it, he felt more aware of the fact that he was a Korean and that that was not necessarily a negative or even a neutral fact about him. The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery.
I appreciated the frequent, and seemingly incidental, references to interviews and panels that the partners would eventually participate in — from the very first page, the reader knows that this novel will be about people who made it big — but I also loved how frank Zevin was about the insane combination of talent, hard work, connections, and luck that it took for Sadie and Sam to develop and launch their game; how draining the forming and running of a company would be on their friendship and creativity (Zevin could have been talking about being a novelist or a singer or an artist of any type). And again, it was the characters themselves — these striving artists — who made the story for me; the following touching me deeply:
“I love you, too, Grandpa.” For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.
I do need to note the novel’s most significant drawback: some unnecessarily obscure vocabulary choices. Maybe gamers can be forgiven for thinking in words like “echt”, “ludic”, and even “grok”, but a passage like the following just comes off as precious (and is the reason I rounded down to four stars instead of up to five):
Zoe was sitting in the living room, cross-legged on a large ikat silk pillow and playing the pan flute, which she was currently learning. Her Titian hair fell past her breasts and her only habiliments were her white cotton underwear.
On the other hand, I can’t stress enough how much I loved the artistic descriptions of the games that were developed (and the collaborative process behind their creation); I loved the philosophical bits about how role-playing in video games (as well as acting on stage or even drawing and solving mazes or seeing the hidden image in a Magic Eye image) unleashes the unconscious mind into the world; I weirdly loved how unglamourous Zevin makes LA sound; and most of all, I loved Sadie and Sam and this story of a remarkable relationship. So much to love here.
