“I don’t think they do. Or maybe they don’t have to, I don’t know.” Sadie paused. “Since I’ve been teaching, I keep thinking about how lucky we were,” she said. “We were lucky to be born when we were.”
“How so?”
“Well, if we’d been born a little bit earlier, we wouldn’t have been able to make our games so easily. Access to computers would have been harder. We would have been part of the generation who was putting floppy disks in Ziploc bags and driving the games to stores. And if we’d been born a little bit later, there would have been even greater access to the internet and certain tools, but honestly, the games got so much more complicated; the industry got so professional. We couldn’t have done as much as we did on our own. We could never have made a game that we could sell to a company like Opus on the resources we had. We wouldn’t have made Ichigo Japanese, because we would have worried about the fact that we weren’t Japanese. And I think, because of the internet, we would have been overwhelmed by how many people were trying to do the exact same things we were. We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game.”
“Sadie, we would have made games no matter what era we’d been born in. Do you know how I know this?”
Sadie shook her head.
“Because Dr. Daedalus and Ms. Marks became game designers, too.”
“They made checkerboards. It’s not the same. And you knew who you were in Pioneers, so that doesn’t count. You had your finger on the scale.”
“You knew who you were as well.”
“I did, and I didn’t,” Sadie said. “But I think there was some trauma—there’s that word again—I was able to play out through that experience. I can’t even explain it. Nothing was getting through to me, and I was so depressed, and I had a baby. And even Freda—God, I miss Freda—was fed up with me. She was like, ‘Mine Sadie, bad things happen to everyone. Enough already.’ But after Pioneers, I wasn’t able to feel quite as terrible about things. The main thing it made me feel was not quite so alone. I don’t think I’ve ever properly thanked you.” Sadie looked at Sam’s face. It was still as familiar as her own. “Thank you, my friend.”
He put his arm over her shoulder. “I have a theory about why you confronted me after the ‘fifth game’ revelation. Do you want to hear it?”
“I suppose I’m about to.”
“I think it was the stirrings of the designer in you, sensing the possibility for an elegant endgame. I wrote the beginning and the middle; you wrote the ending.”
“This is a theory,” Sadie said. “Do you need to turn around?”
“No, I’m good,” Sam said. “Let’s stay out a little longer.”
They had made it up to Ninety-ninth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Sam pointed up to a tenement building with exterior fire escapes. “This is where my mom and I used to live. Seventh floor. Back in 1984, it was a rough part of town, but now it doesn’t look that bad to me.”
“There aren’t any rough parts of New York now.”
Sadie looked up at the building. She imagined a child Sam, gazing out the window at her. He is perfect and unmarked, like her own daughter. But if Sam hadn’t been as traumatized as Sadie now realized he had been, would he have pushed them so hard? Would Sadie have been the designer she became without Sam’s ambitions for them? And would Sam have had those ambitions without the childhood trauma? She didn’t know. The work had been hers, yes, but it had equally been his. It had been theirs, and it wouldn’t have existed without the both of them. This was a tautology that had only taken her the better part of two decades to understand.
Since she’d started teaching and become a mother, she’d felt old, but that night, she realized she wasn’t old at all. You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.
She looked past the building to the sky. It was a deep, blue velvet night, and the moon hung heavy and supernaturally spherical in the sky. “I wonder who built this engine,” Sadie said.
“It’s good work,” Sam said. “The God rays are nicely done, but the moon is almost too beautiful. The scale seems off.”
“How is it so large and low? And it needs more texture. A bit of Perlin noise. It should look a little rougher, otherwise it doesn’t seem real.”
“But maybe that’s the look they were going for?”
“Maybe so.”
* * *
—
Sadie’s flight back to Boston left an hour before Sam’s flight to Los Angeles, but they had decided to share a cab to the airport. Since he had time to pass, he walked her to her gate. She seemed preoccupied to him, in the way that people are before a voyage, and though he had things he wanted to say to her, the manic energy of the airport did not lend itself to conversation. By the time they arrived at her gate, Sadie’s boarding group was already being called.
“Well, this is me,” she said.
“This is you,” he said.
He watched as she joined the line, and it occurred to him that it might be years before he saw her again. “Sadie,” he called, “I just want you to know. I think you should make more games. With or without me. You’re too good at it to quit.”
Sadie left the line, and she went back to where Sam stood.
“I haven’t completely quit. I mean, for a long time I had. But I’m working some,” she said. “There’s no point in making something if you don’t think it could be great.”
“I agree. Still, I’d like to make a game with you again, if you ever find the time.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“Probably not,” Sam said, laughing. “But I want to do it anyway. I don’t know how to stop myself from wanting to do it. Every time I run into you for the rest of our lives, I’ll ask you to make a game with me. There’s some groove in my brain that insists it is a good idea.”
“Isn’t that the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different result.”
“That’s a game character’s life, too,” Sam said. “The world of infinite restarts. Start again at the beginning, this time you might win. And it’s not as if all our results were bad. I love the things we made. We were a great team.”
Sam offered Sadie his hand, and she shook it. She pulled him into her, and she kissed Sam on the cheek. “I love you, Sadie,” Sam said.
“I know, Sam. I love you, too.”
Sadie returned to the line. She was nearly to the front for the second time when she looked over her shoulder. “Sam,” she said, “you still game, right?” Her voice was light, and her eyes were playful, and Sam recognized the invitation that was being extended, as clearly as if it were the title screen of a video game.
“Of course,” Sam replied quickly and with too much enthusiasm. “You know I do.”