When he’d gone to speak to Unfair about his grand plan for selling Ichigo,
Dov had one question: “So, Ichigo’s a boy, right?” “We didn’t see them that way,” Sam said. “Them?” Dov said.
“What Sam thought, and I agree, is that gender doesn’t matter at that age. So, we never identify Ichigo’s gender,” Sadie explained.
“That’s clever,” Dov said, “and it absolutely will not work. You want to sell this game in Walmart, right? You want to sell this game to people in the heartland. Marx, you’re practical, what do you think?”
“I’m completely down with what Sadie and Sam are doing,” Marx said carefully, loyally. “And it didn’t affect my play at all. I’m a guy and I saw Ichigo as a boy.”
“There!” Dov said. “That’s exactly it. That’s exactly my point. Ichigo should be a boy. Guys, I admire your creativity, but why put yourselves at a disadvantage for some bullshit Harvard thesis idea that no one will ever notice anyway?”
“Dov, why is Ichigo definitely a boy? Why can’t Ichigo be a girl?” Sadie said.
“You know perfectly well that games with female main characters sell fewer copies,” Dov said.
“But Dead Sea has a girl MC,” Sadie protested. “And it’s sold, what? A million copies?”
“Worldwide, yes, more than that even. But in the States, only about 750K.”
“That’s an enormous hit,” Sadie said.
“It would have sold twice that if I hadn’t made the Wraith a girl. But I didn’t have me as an adviser.”
Sadie was shredding a piece of notebook paper into a tidy pile. Dov put his hand over her hand to stop her.
“Listen guys, it’s not my game. It’s up to you. It’s just my advice. If the ‘them’ thing is important to you, leave it. If you want Ichigo to be a girl, fine. The great thing for you is, it’s a brilliant game and you have all the options. We can table this issue until the publishers weigh in, if you want.”
Ichigo’s top two offers were from Cellar Door Games, where Sadie had been an undistinguished intern, and Opus Interactive, the gaming division of the Austin, Texas–based PC company, Opus Computers.
Cellar Door didn’t see Ichigo’s gender as an issue. Cellar Door was a young company, run by recent MIT grads, and they thought the genderless Ichigo was “edgy and cool.” They offered a relatively modest advance, a generous profit-sharing agreement, and an additional advance for their next game, which did not have to be a sequel to Ichigo. “We don’t just want to be in the Ichigo business,” Jonas Lippman, the twenty-nine-year-old CEO of Cellar Door, said. “We want to be in, uh, your business. Sorry, that came out weird. I didn’t know if your company has a name yet.”
Opus Computers offered a much larger advance—five times as large. They were launching a new gaming laptop, the Opus Wizardware, and their plan was to preload Ichigo on every Opus Wizardware PC sold during the Christmas 1997 season. They thought Ichigo, with its stylish, clean graphics and character design, and its emotional, family-friendly story, was the perfect game to sell gaming laptops to those who didn’t think it was possible to play great games on anything but a console. They wanted a sequel to Ichigo, delivered in time for the Christmas 1998 season, for which they would pay twice as much money. And yes, to the all-male acquisitions team from Texas, Ichigo was definitely a boy—there had never been a question.
Sadie wanted to go with Cellar Door. She preferred the looser terms of their deal, and the truth was, she hadn’t liked the Opus guys. Opus had flown the four of them down to Texas to meet the heads of the gaming
division. Aaron Opus, the fifty-year-old, handlebar mustachioed, cowboy- hat-boots-bolo-tie-silver-bullhorn-buckle-Canadian-tuxedo-wearing head of the company, had surprised everyone by showing up at the meeting. Later, back at the hotel, Sadie commented to Dov that Aaron Opus looked like he did all his shopping at the barn-sized western wear stores that dotted the road from the Austin airport. But Dov found Aaron Opus delightful. “I love that Americana shit,” he said.
“It’s a costume,” Sadie protested. “Opus is from Connecticut. He went to Yale.”
“I love this guy! I’m stopping at one of those stores before we go back,” Dov said. “Real men wear at least three different kinds of dead animals.”
“Gross,” Sadie said.
At the meeting, Aaron Opus apologized if he looked haggard, but he’d stayed up for two nights playing Ichigo. “Everyone knows you already, Mr. Mizrah,” he said to Dov. Then he turned and addressed himself to Sam, “So, you’re the programmer?”
“I’m a programmer,” Sam said. “But Sadie’s the programmer.” “We designed the game together,” Sadie said.
Aaron Opus nodded. He studied Sam’s face, and then he studied Sadie’s face, and then he turned his attention back to Sam.
“The little fella, Ichigo. He looks a lot like you,” Aaron Opus said. He nodded some more, as if deciding something. “Mm-hmm. You’re the face of the game, I reckon.”
When they got back to Cambridge, they exhaustively went over the two offers. Sadie said she liked Cellar Door because it didn’t require them to make a sequel, and because she’d felt Cellar Door was more of a chemistry fit. Sam said he didn’t even understand why they were considering Cellar Door when Opus had offered so much more money. Dov said both were good offers, but different paths, and it depended on what they wanted. He added that since the profit-sharing terms Cellar Door was offering were better, they might even make more money with Cellar Door in the long run. Marx said he, too, liked the creative freedom of the Cellar Door offer, but
he felt the Opus deal had the potential to make Ichigo bigger. Opus had guaranteed that Ichigo would be featured prominently in the multimillion- dollar advertising campaign for the Opus Wizardware PC. If the game did what they thought it could do, Opus saw animation, Macy’s Thanksgiving balloons, and tons of merch in Ichigo’s future. Cellar Door didn’t have the apparatus or the money to make that happen, not anytime soon.
By the end of the night, Marx, Dov, and Sam were on the side of Opus.
Sadie was the only holdout for Cellar Door.
“It’s life-changing money,” Sam said. “Honestly.”
“But I don’t want to spend another year of my changed life making an
Ichigo sequel,” Sadie said.
“I get that,” Marx said. “And I support Sadie, if that’s what she wants.
You guys are the creatives on this, so the two of you have to decide.”
Sam asked Sadie to go out onto the balcony, so they could collogue. He was still in a cast and he couldn’t get around very well; otherwise, he would have preferred to go on a walk with her. He felt like he thought better and was more persuasive when he was in motion.
Sadie spoke first. “The Cellar Door advance is fine, and they truly understand the game we’re trying to make,” she reasoned. “And we’ll be able to spend next year making something new, something better. And how can you be so quick to sell out the thing we were trying to do with Ichigo’s gender? I thought that was important to you.”
“It is, but it’s so much money,” Sam said.
“Why do you suddenly care about money? You’re twenty-two, how much money do you need? If you wanted to make money, you never should have made the game. You could have done Harvard recruiting, and ended up with a six-figure job at Bear Stearns, like everyone else in your class.”
“You’ve never been poor,” Sam said, “so you don’t understand.” Sam paused. He hated admitting vulnerabilities, even to Sadie. “I’ve got student loans. I owe a ton of money for the emergency room visit and the surgery on my ankle and foot, and if I don’t start paying it back, the bills will go to my grandparents. At the moment, I’ve got negative dollars in my bank account. Marx is paying the rent, and I’m eating off the butt ends of credit
cards. If we take the Cellar Door offer, I won’t have anything to live on while we make the next game. I need this, Sadie, but honestly, I also think it’s the better offer, the one that can really blow Ichigo up. And I know you must see that. I think the real reason you don’t like them is because they thought I was the programmer.”
Sadie sat down on the balcony. She loathed the Opus guys, and the thought of making an Ichigo sequel for them made her feel like she was being shackled and blindfolded and gagged and locked into a duffel bag and tossed into the bottom of the sea.
Sam was struggling to lower himself to sit down next to her. Sadie gave him her hand, but even with her assistance, he still landed a bit hard. He put his head in the crook of her shoulder; the freight was in proportion to the groove.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said. “Okay, Sam,” she said. “Opus it is.”
—
Once Ichigo had become a real boy, his identity and Sam’s identity became more and more inseparable. People beyond Aaron Opus started to say Sam looked like Ichigo—he did, somewhat. They ate up Sam’s colorful and tragic biography: the childhood injury and playing video games as a way to be invincible, the Korean grandfather with the pizza parlor and the Donkey Kong machine. They tried to find ways in which Sam’s biography and Ichigo’s overlapped. Both had been separated from their parents at young ages. Sam was Asian, and Ichigo was Asian—in 1997, no one made the distinction between Japanese and half-Korean; that Sam was Asian was good enough. Because people—critics, gamers, the Opus marketing department—could more easily find Sam in the game, Ichigo became Sam’s creation, not Sadie’s, and as such, he became the game’s auteur. (As for his relationship to Sadie, they were neither siblings nor married/divorced people nor dating nor had they ever dated, and thus, people found their relationship too mystifying and non-relatable to be worth exploring.)
As part of their promotion, Opus sent Sam to all the game conferences, which were much smaller affairs in those days. Sadie could have chosen to go along with him, but she felt as if her time was better spent at the new Unfair Games offices (fluorescent lighted and industrial carpeted, but no longer in Marx’s living room at least). She was simultaneously supervising the Ichigo sequel and completing her BS at MIT. Besides, Sam liked the attention more than she did. She didn’t begrudge him this: he liked interviews; he liked bloviating to a crowd; he liked having his photo taken. Someone had to do it, and Sadie felt uncomfortable speaking about the work—the work, she naively felt, should speak for itself. Sadie was twenty- two when Ichigo was launched, and she hadn’t figured out who she was in public yet. (She barely knew who she was in private.) There were so few prominent female game designers, and there wasn’t exactly a playbook for how a female game designer was supposed to present herself. But the fact is, no one at Opus was pushing Sadie to put herself forward either. The men at Opus wanted Sam to be the face of Ichigo, and so he was. The gaming industry, like many industries, loves its wonder boys.
Still, Sadie had to concede, if only to herself: it wasn’t only that Sam liked promotion; he was better at it than she was. Before the game’s launch, they had done a joint appearance at a sales conference in Boca Raton. It had been the biggest crowd they had ever spoken to, around five hundred people. Sam had been nervous, but Sadie hadn’t been nervous at all. He had paced around the makeshift greenroom up until the moment they were called on stage.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Sam had said.
“You’ll be fine.” Sadie had squeezed his hand and poured him a glass of water. “It’s a hotel ballroom and a couple of hundred nerds.”
“I don’t like so many eyes on me,” Sam had said. He raked his fingers through his hair, which had become a Jewfro in the Florida humidity.
But as soon as they got on the dais, Sam’s nerves disappeared, and he transformed into the world’s most entertaining talk-show guest. When Sadie was asked a question—something like “How did you two meet?”—she
gave a specific answer, usually no more than two sentences. “Well, we’re both from Los Angeles,” Sadie said. “And we both liked to game.”
When Sam was asked a question, he turned it into a novella. The story could go on for fifteen minutes and take an extended detour into childhood without anyone ever seeming the slightest bit bored. “On the day I met Sadie, I hadn’t spoken to anyone for six weeks, literally six weeks. But that’s a whole other story. I’ll tell you some other time when we’re better friends. But the main thing you need to know is, Sadie couldn’t get Mario on top of the flagpole. This was before the internet. You couldn’t just cheat. You had to know someone who knew…” The crowd leaned forward when he spoke, laughed at his jokes, spontaneously broke into applause. They loved him. He was more handsome in front of a crowd; his limp, less apparent; his voice, warm and authoritative. It was as if all these years Sam had been waiting for an audience. Sadie marveled at his transformation. Where had her introverted partner gone? Who was this raconteur? Who was this clown?
And next to him, Sadie felt herself diminish.
