She unzipped the outer pocket of her laptop bag, and she took out a small drive. She reached over the rope that separated them, and she placed the drive into his hands. “Have a look at this for me, if you have the time. I’ve barely started, and it’s not good. Not yet, at least. Maybe you’ll know what to do with it?”
Sadie closed her bag, and she handed her boarding pass to the gate agent.
“What’s the best way to contact you?” Sam asked.
“Send me a text. Or an email. Or stop by my office, if you’re ever in Cambridge. I keep office hours. Tuesdays and Fridays, from two to four.”
“No problem,” Sam said. “It’s a quick six-hour flight from Los Angeles. Less time than it takes to get from Venice to Echo Park.”
“If you come, I have a Donkey Kong machine in my office. Old friends play free.”
Sam watched Sadie disappear into the connecting tunnel and then he looked down at the drive: the game was called Ludo Sextus. Sadie had handwritten the title. He would know her handwriting anywhere.
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are no secret highways. None that I know of, at least. But if you find the right rideshare driver or go to a party with someone who has lived in L.A. a long time, you might hear a story about one.
Like Sam, I once lived in a house up a hill from the Happy Foot Sad Foot sign. The Happy Foot Sad Foot sign was taken down in 2019, but I am told you can still find its remains in a gift shop somewhere in Silver Lake. Across town, Clownerina, created by Jonathan Borofsky, was restored some years ago and now kicks for several hours a day, though I have not seen it in action.
The Necco Wafer Factory has not been in Cambridge for many years, but the water tower is still painted in pastels.
As far as I know, there was never a Christmas advertisement for Cheri Smith and Tom Baccei’s Magic Eye series in Harvard Square’s T station. On a related note, for many years I did not think Magic Eye illusions worked for me and now they do.
The book about consciousness that Sadie mentions when she is talking about the brain having an AI version of deceased loved ones is I Am a Strange Loop, by Doug Hofstadter, a source suggested to me by Hans Canosa.
The detail of Macbeth throwing dinner rolls at Banquo’s empty chair comes from the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2018 production of Macbeth, directed by Polly Findlay and starring Christopher Eccleston in the title role.
The Tamer of Horses in Friendship recites from Alfred John Church’s 1895 translation of The Iliad.
Although my parents both worked in computers and I am a lifelong gamer, these sources were particularly helpful to my thinking about and understanding of 1990s-and 2000s-era game culture and designers: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Jason Schreier; Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner; Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution （specifically the section on Sierra On-Line）， by Steven Levy; A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games, by Dylan Holmes; Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, by Tom Bissell; All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture, by Harold Goldberg; and the documentaries Indie Game: The Movie, directed by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, and GTFO, directed by Shannon Sun-Higginson. I read Indie Games by Bounthavy Suvilay after I finished writing, and it’s a beautiful book for those looking to see how artful games can be.
Despite its meme status, the phrase “You have died of dysentery” never appears in the 1985 version of The Oregon Trail, which is the one Sam and Sadie would have played and the one I played as a child. What they （and I） would have seen in the 1980s is “You have dysentery” and then, assuming they did not recover from dysentery, “You have died.” This, and other facts about The Oregon Trail, can be found in You Have Died of Dysentery: The Creation of the Oregon Trail—the Iconic Educational Game of the 1980s, by R. Philip Bouchard, who was the lead designer for the 1985 version. I would also like to acknowledge the many games that inspired Pioneers, including The Oregon Trail, developed by Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger; Stardew Valley, designed by Eric Barone; Animal Crossing, designed by Katsuya Eguchi, Hisashi Nogami, Shigeru Miyamoto, and Takashi Tesuka; Harvest Moon, designed by Yasuhiro Wada; The Sims, created by Will Wright; and EverQuest, designed by Brad McQuaid, John Smedley, Bill Trost, and Steve Clover. For the most part, I have credited the designers, but as readers of this book will know, it is difficult to say who is responsible for any game or game element unless you were there. What is certain: in my life, I have slaughtered more than a few virtual bison and rid much land of the scourge of pixelated rocks.
It is unlikely that Dov would have received a beta copy of Metal Gear Solid in January 1996, or that Sadie would have played King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella in August 1988. Throughout the book, I chose the games that made the most sense for the story, even when the dates were slightly wrong. King’s Quest IV, for example, is one of the few prominent games of that era with a female protagonist and, not coincidentally, one of the first games I loved.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel about work, and I would be remiss if I did not thank my colleagues, whose ideas, skills, questions, observations, provocations, encouragements, witticisms, letters, phone calls, Zooms, texts, PowerPoint presentations, and occasional course corrections have improved this book enormously. Thank you especially to my American editor, Jenny Jackson, and to my literary agent, Douglas Stewart. Thanks also to Stuart Gelwarg, Dana Spector, Becky Hardie, Lara Hinchberger, Bradley Garrett, Danielle Bukowski, Szilvia Molnar, Maria Bell, Caspian Dennis, Nicole Winstanley, Reagan Arthur, Maris Dyer, Louise Collazo, Nora Reichard, Katrina Northern, Emily Reardon, Julianne Clancy, Wyck Godfrey, Isaac Klausner, Avital Siegel, Bryan Oh, Daria Cercek, Ellie Walker, Kathy Pories, Tayari Jones, Rebecca Serle, and Jennifer Wolfe.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is equally about love. Thank you to Hans Canosa, my favorite human and person to play games with, even when he is a bad sport. I thank my parents every time, but why not? I have excellent ones. Their names are Richard and AeRan Zevin.
My books can be divided into dog eras. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was begun in the era of Edie and Frank and completed in the era of Leia and Frank. Good dogs, all.
a note about the author
Gabrielle Zevin is the New York Times and internationally best-selling author of several critically acclaimed novels, including The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, which won the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award and the Japan Booksellers’ Award, among other honors, and Young Jane Young, which won the Southern Book Prize. The film version of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, for which Zevin wrote the adaptation, will be released at the end of 2022. Her novels have been translated into thirty-nine languages. She has also written books for young readers, including the award-winning Elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.