Sadie didn’t begin work on the storm until the middle of August. She knew the storm would be the gamer’s first experience of Ichigo, and she felt pressure to make it spectacular. She also knew it would, in all likelihood, be the last thing she had a chance of completing before she and Sam both had to return to their respective schools in the fall.
Sam and Sadie hadn’t said it to each other yet, but they both knew they weren’t going to finish the game by September. They knew the work they were doing was good—better than good even. They may have felt that if they articulated the fact that the game would not be completed in the summer—which after all, had been Sam’s arbitrary deadline—they would somehow break the magic of their collaboration. Marx, ever the good producer, had tried to gently broach the subject with them. He had suggested they come up with a school year work schedule, but neither had wanted to discuss it. Sam and Sadie would ignore the realities of their lives and crunch for as long as they could.
Like most twenty-year-olds, Sadie had never built a complicated graphics and physics engine before, and it was to be expected that she struggled with building one for Ichigo. Sam and Sadie wanted the graphics to have the lightness of transparent watercolors, but Sadie could not achieve this lightness, no matter what she tried. When Ichigo ran, for instance, she wanted the look to be less solid, almost watery. The aspirational design document she and Sam had written described Ichigo’s run (in contrast to their walk) as having “the speed, beauty, and danger of water in motion. When the child runs, they resemble nothing so much as a wave. When they jump, they are a typhoon.” In her initial attempts, Ichigo only looked blurry and invisible—nothing like “water in motion.” When she approached the
look she wanted, the game would, more often than not, abruptly crash. But the real weaknesses of Sadie’s engine did not become apparent until she was forced to make the storm.
What is a storm? Sadie thought. It is water, and it is light, and it is wind. And it is how these three elements act on the surfaces they touch. How hard can that be?
Sadie showed her first attempt at the cutscene storm to Sam. He watched it twice before he weighed in.
“Sadie,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but this isn’t that good yet.”
Sadie knew it wasn’t good, but it still pissed her off. “What isn’t good about it?” she demanded.
“Nothing feels real.”
“How can anything feel real when our landscapes look like woodblock prints?”
“Maybe ‘real’ is the wrong word. I don’t feel anything when I look at it. I don’t feel scared. I don’t feel…” Sam played the scene again. “It’s the lighting,” Sam said. “I think the lighting is off. And the texture. The water…The water doesn’t feel, like, wet.”
“If it’s so easy, you try building a fucking storm!” Sadie went into her room and she slammed the door, and then once she was alone, she effortlessly made a storm with her eyes.
Sadie was exhausted, and she felt that she was failing Ichigo. The ideas in their design document were beautiful, and the work Sam was creating was beautiful, and it was her job to render this work in game form. Sadie loathed games where the box art was spectacular but when you went to play the actual game, it looked nothing like the concept art.
And it wasn’t only that Sam hadn’t liked her storm, or that his criticisms potentially suggested larger issues in the game’s graphics overall. It was that she had barely slept or showered for three months, and they still weren’t going to finish this game! They had done so much work—they had mapped out all the levels and they had written the entire story and they had designed the backgrounds and the characters, and yet…there was still SO
MUCH WORK to do. She felt herself begin to panic. She went into Marx’s nightstand where she knew he had left a passel of neatly rolled joints, and she smoked one.
Sam knocked on the door. “May I come in?”
“Sure,” Sadie said. She was beginning to be pleasantly high.
Sam sat on the bed next to her, and she offered him the joint, which he refused. He hated when Sadie or Marx smoked, and he opened the window. At twenty-two, Sam was a complete teetotaler. He never drank, didn’t even like taking aspirin. The only drugs he’d ever taken were whatever painkillers he’d been given in the hospital, and he hadn’t liked the way they had clouded his ability to think. The body part that worked consistently well for Sam was his brain, and he was not going to compromise it. Because of this experience, Sam often suffered through pain that probably should have and could have been somewhat ameliorated.
“It’s the engine,” Sadie said without emotion. “It’s my lighting and texture engine. It’s no good.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Sam asked.
“It’s…” Sadie said. “It’s me…I’m not good enough at making one yet.” “You can do anything,” Sam said. “I completely believe in you.”
Sam’s belief weighed heavily on her. She got into bed and pulled the covers over her head. “I need a nap.”
While Sadie rested, Sam went to work researching game engines. He knew it was possible to borrow game engines from other companies. If you found one that was like the work you wanted, using another designer’s game engine might save you a lot of work and even, in the long run, expense. He and Sadie had discussed this once before, and he knew she was against using another designer’s engine. From the beginning, she had insisted all the programming be theirs. Because if it wasn’t, their game would be less original, and they’d cede power (and often, profit) to the maker of the engine. Of course, she was parroting Dov’s teachings.
Still, Sam spent the rest of the afternoon looking through all the games that he, Sadie, and Marx owned. As a largely self-taught programmer, Sam learned to do things by taking games apart. Although reverse engineering is
a common practice in tech, Sam had learned this technique from his grandfather. When something broke in the restaurant—from the cash register to the outdoor floodlights to the pizza oven to the pay phone to the dishwasher—Dong Hyun would painstakingly disassemble the broken thing, meticulously laying out all the parts, in order, on an old tablecloth. Most of the time, he would be able to fix whatever it was. He’d hold up a corroded gasket in triumph and say, “Ah ha! Here’s the culprit! I can get a new one of these for ninety-nine cents at the hardware store!” And then Dong Hyun would replace the part and put everything back together again. Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken. Sam believed these things as well.
Sam decided he would study other games to find anything close to the lighting and texture effects they wanted. He would dismantle the game, if it was possible to dismantle, and see what he could learn/steal, and then he would report his findings to Sadie.
At the bottom of Sadie’s pile, he found a copy of Dead Sea. Sam had heard about Dead Sea, but he’d never taken the time to play it.
—
When Sadie woke up, Marx and Sam were gathered in front of Sam’s computer. “Look at this,” Sam said. “This is sort of what the storm should look like, right?”
Sadie had never spoken to Sam about Dov, and she had never asked him if he had played Dead Sea. She casually sidled up to the PC to look at her ex-lover’s game, as if she hadn’t seen it a hundred times before. “It’s a bit moodier than what I thought we were going for,” Sadie said.
“Of course,” Sam said. “I don’t mean it literally looks like this. But the quality he gives to light. Do you see the refraction through the water? Do you see the airiness? The atmosphere?”
“I do,” Sadie said. She sat down next to Sam. “You’re going to need to pick up that log,” Sadie said to Marx, who was playing the game. “You’re
going to need it to brain that zombie.” “Thanks,” Marx said.
“His engine is called Ulysses, by the way,” Sadie said. “And he designed it himself.”
“Who’s he?” Sam asked.
“The designer and programmer. His name is Dov Mizrah. I used to know him a bit.”
“How?” Sam said.
“He was my professor,” Sadie said.
“Well, why don’t you call him up?” Sam said. “If you’re still struggling with building the engine, I mean…”
“Right,” Sadie said. “I probably should.”
“Maybe he’d have tips?” Sam added. “Or maybe we could even use his graphics engine?”
“I don’t know, Sam.”
“If I can ease your mind. We’re doing so many things with this game already. I don’t think that every last bit of the programming has to be original. You have this purity thing, but seriously, no one will care. There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn’t matter at all. The game is going to be completely original because we made it. If you have access to a tool that will help, there is no reason not to use that tool. Our game isn’t going to be anything like Dead Sea, so what difference does it make in the end?”
In the morning, Sadie emailed Dov, and it turned out he was back in Cambridge, teaching the games seminar in the fall and completing work on Dead Sea II. He invited her to come down to his studio, and so she went.
When she arrived at Dov’s studio, she held out her hand for him to shake, and he pulled her into an embrace. “I’m so glad you emailed me, Sadie Green! I was planning to email you, but things got too crazy. I’m almost done with Dead Sea II. Last time I ever do a sequel. How are you?” he said.
She told him about Ichigo.
“Good title. This is what you should be doing,” he said, maybe a dash of condescension in his voice. “You should be making your own games.”
Sadie took some of Sam’s concept art out of her messenger bag and she showed it to him. “Whoa, trippy,” Dov said. Then she took out her laptop so that he could play the first level. “This is fucking fantastic work,” Dov said. He never gave compliments that he didn’t mean, and Sadie almost felt like crying. It was frankly embarrassing how much his approval still meant to her. “I like this.” Dov looked at Sadie. He set the concept art on the desk. He looked in her eyes, and then he nodded. “You’re here for Ulysses, aren’t you?”
At first, Sadie was going to deny it, claim she wanted some tips about building her own engine. “Yes,” she said. “I want Ulysses.”
“You know what I always say about making your own engines.” She nodded.
“But I can see how Ulysses would be a perfect fit for what you and your colleague—what’s his name?”
“Sam Masur.”
“What you and Mr. Masur are trying to accomplish. And how can I deny my Sadie when she comes to me in need?”
It was that simple. Dov gave her the engine, and in exchange, he became a producer and equity partner on Ichigo, bonding him to her professional life forever.
When Dov came down to the apartment to help Sadie set up Ulysses, Marx hated him immediately: the leather pants, the tight black T-shirt, the heavy silver jewelry, the immaculate goatee, the eyebrows permanently in the shape of circumflexes, the topknot. “The poor man’s Chris Cornell,” Marx whispered, referencing the lead singer of the grunge band Soundgarden.
“Chris Cornell?” Sam said. “I think he looks like a satyr.”
But it was Dov’s cologne that Marx loathed. It wasn’t a cheap cologne, but as soon as he came into the room, his scent was everywhere, and even after he left, and they opened every window in the apartment, Marx could still smell him. The room felt murky and musky, oppressive with pine,
patchouli, and cedar. It was, he felt, an aggressively male cologne, a roofie of a cologne.
Marx also felt that Dov was too physically intimate with Sadie. When Dov had been at Sadie’s workstation, his hand kept drifting over to touch her and invade her space. The hand rested on her shoulder, the hand drifted onto her thigh, the hand on her keyboard, the hand on her mouse. Sadie, laughing with a strange, brittle tone. Dov, brushing strands of hair out of her eyes. Marx recognized it as the intimacy of ex-lovers.
Marx pulled Sam into the bedroom. “You didn’t say that Sadie used to be Dov’s girlfriend,” Marx said to Sam.
Sam shrugged. “I didn’t know.” “How could you not know?”
“We don’t talk about those kinds of things,” Sam said.
“I mean, he was her professor, too, right? That’s an abuse of power.
Don’t you think that’s relevant if he’s going to be a producer with us?” “I don’t actually,” Sam said. “Sadie’s a grown-up.”
“Barely,” Marx said.
Marx poked his head out of the room, so he could continue to spy on Sadie and Dov.
Dov was doing most of the talking. “If I were you,” Dov said, “I would take the next semester off.”
Sadie was listening, nodding.
“You and your crew. You’ve got something here,” Dov said. “I really believe that.”
“But school…” Sadie’s voice was barely audible. “My parents…” “Who cares about any of that? No one cares if you’re a good girl
anymore, Sadie. I want to empower you to shed your conventional notions, once and for all. The point of your education has been to do exactly the thing that you’re currently doing. Get the bulk of the programming done while you’re in the flow, and then you can finish school in the spring and the summer, while you finish the sound and debug.”
More listening, more nodding.
“Do you need me, your former professor, to order you?”
“Maybe,” she said.
“I’ll help you,” Dov said. “Thank you, Dov.”
“I’m always here for you, brilliant one.”
He took her in his hirsute arms and he pressed her face deep into his chest. Marx wondered how she could bear the stench.
—
Two weeks later, on the day she finished work on the storm, Sadie informed Marx and Sam that she was taking off the semester to finish the game. Implementing Ulysses meant redoing a significant portion of the work she’d already done, and she didn’t want to lose momentum. “You don’t have to take the semester off,” she said to them, “but I’m going to.”
“I was hoping you’d say that,” Sam said. “Because that’s what I want to do, too. Marx?”
“Sam, are you sure?”
Sam nodded. “I’m sure. But the big question is: Might we keep using the apartment?”
“You can have your room back, of course,” Sadie said to Marx. “I’ll find somewhere else to stay, but it would be great if we could keep working here.”
“Where will you stay?” Sam asked.
“At Dov’s,” she said. There was no drama in her voice. “He’s producing with us now, and he said he had an extra room that I could use.” Everyone knew this was a lie.
That fall, Marx was the only one of them who returned to school. Due to his producing obligations, it was also the lone year that he wasn’t in any plays. In truth, theater, far more than classes, had always taken up the bulk of Marx’s time.
