s.g.: Mazer knew I had made a couple of games at MIT, nothing much more than mini-games at that point. This one called Solution got me a little attention.
d.l.: That’s the Holocaust one, right? It almost got you thrown out of school.
s.g.: [Rolls eyes.] That’s how Sam likes to tell the story. He likes it to have drama, but honestly one person complained, it wasn’t that big of a thing…But Sam—sorry I know I’m supposed to call Sam Mazer, but I always forget. Mazer loved Solution. Mazer felt like it was a breakthrough for me. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever make another game after Solution. I felt pretty burnt out. But toward the end of my junior year, Sam says, “You want to go to the Glass Flowers?” And the truth is, I really didn’t! It didn’t at all sound like something I’d want to do, and it’s fairly inconvenient to get to the Harvard Museum of Natural History from where I was living at MIT. But I went up there, because Sam—Mazer!—can be a little persistent when Mazer wants something. And as you probably know, Mazer always wants something. [Laughs.]
So, we trudge up to the exhibit and it’s closed. It’s, like, museum inventory day, or cleaning, or something. There’s a poster out front for the Glass Flowers, and I’m not the first person to make this observation, but it’s fairly pointless to put up a picture of the Glass Flowers, because the models are so good, they look like actual flowers.
And I’m kind of irritated, because now I’ve gotten all the way here, and I’m not going to see the Glass Flowers, which I didn’t want to see in the first place, and I’m annoyed with Sam for not calling the museum first. Sam sits down on a bench and he’s kind of out of breath from the walk and he says, “What are you doing this summer?”
And I’m, like, “What are you talking about?”
And he goes, “Stay here, take three months, and make a game with me. Carmack and Romero were the same age as us when they made Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen. We can use Marx’s [Watanabe, producer, Ichigo] apartment for free. I already asked.”
From the time we were kids, we had always gamed together, but until he said that, I had no idea he even wanted to make games. Sam always kept things pretty close to the vest. But, well, I was at a crossroads with my own designing career, and Sam is a brilliant guy and my oldest friend, so I thought, Why not? If it works out, great. If not, I’ll spend the summer with my friend. And Marx’s apartment was pretty damn sweet—panoramic windows with views of the Charles, on Kennedy Street, just west of Harvard Square.
So, I told him I’d think about it, but I could tell he knew I was going to do it.
We walk back to town, and he looks at me seriously and he says, “Sadie, when you tell this story, say I asked you at the glass flower exhibit. Don’t say it was closed.” The myth, the narrative, whatever you want to call it, was always of supreme importance to Sam. So, I guess, by even telling this story, I’m betraying him.
When Sadie was in her mid-thirties and what had felt like many lifetimes had passed, she would finally visit the Glass Flowers and find them unexpectedly moving. The flowers were magnificent, of course, but what struck her even more were the models the Blaschkas had made of decomposing fruits, their bruises and discolorations, in medias res, preserved for eternity. What a world, Sadie thought. People once made glass sculptures of decay, and they put these sculptures in museums. How strange and beautiful human beings are. And how fragile. An elegant older woman, who reminded her of Freda, two years gone, had been the only other person in the gallery that morning. The woman （cashmere cardigan; redolent of Fracas, with its distinctive tuberose notes） had trailed slightly behind Sadie the entire time. When they were done, the woman asked Sadie, “Those were lovely, but where are the glass flowers?” The models’ verisimilitude was so convincing, the woman had thought they were real.
Sadie’s instinct had been to tell Sam, but they weren’t speaking at the time.
2
When we first meet Ichigo in a cutscene at the beginning of Ichigo: A Child of the Sea, they—for Sadie and Sam conceived of Ichigo as having no gender—are a small child who knows few words and cannot read. Ichigo is sitting on the beach, by their parents’ modest seaside house, in what looks like a remote fishing village. They have a shiny black bowl haircut of the kind that an Asian child of any gender might have, and they are wearing only their favorite sports jersey （number 15）， which goes to their knees like a dress, and wooden flip-flops. Ichigo is playing with a small bucket and a shovel when the tsunami hits.
Ichigo is swept out to sea, and that is where the game begins. With a limited vocabulary, their only tools that bucket and shovel, Ichigo must find their way home.
A bromide about the creative process is that an artist’s first idea is usually the best one. Ichigo was not Sam and Sadie’s first idea. It was, perhaps, their thousandth.
Herein, the difficulty. Sam and Sadie both knew what they liked in a game, and they could easily tell a good game from a bad game. For Sadie, that knowledge was not necessarily helpful. Her time with Dov and her years studying games in general had made her critical of everything. She could tell you exactly what was wrong with any game, but she didn’t necessarily know how to make a great game herself. There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway. And it is possible that, without Sam （or someone like him） pushing her through this period, Sadie might not have become the game designer she became. She might not have become a designer at all.
Sadie knew she didn’t want to make a shooter, though, again, that was what tended to be popular. （She would never want to make a shooter—she, Dov’s student to her core, found them disgusting, immoral, and the disease of an immature society; Sam, for his part, enjoyed shooters.） And, in a summer, with only a team of two, there were limitations to what she felt they could accomplish. They weren’t trying to go for consoles, and they didn’t have the resources to make a fully 3D action game like an N64-era Zelda or a Mario anyway. The game would be for PC, and it would be 2D or 2?D, if she could swing it. For a long time, that was the extent of what she knew about their game.
In the weeks leading up to the end of the school year, Sadie and Sam brainstormed a long list of ideas on a whiteboard that Sam had stolen from the Science Center. Even with his bad foot, Sam was an accomplished thief, and he enjoyed a petty theft from time to time. He had walked into the Science Center for a goodbye meeting with Larsson. On the way out, he had seen the whiteboard unattended in a hallway, and he rolled it right out of the building, and then kept rolling it—across Harvard Yard, waving at a tour of prospective students as he passed, through Harvard Square, straight down Kennedy Street, and right up into the elevator of their building. The key to being a good thief, Sam always felt, was utter brazenness. Later in the week, he stole a pack of multicolor dry-erase markers from the Harvard Coop. He slipped them into the enormous pocket of the enormous coat that Marx had given him, and he walked right out the door.
For a long time, nothing they wrote on the whiteboard felt essential to them. They might have never made a game before. Their office might be in Sam’s rich roommate’s apartment, but they were young enough to believe that whatever they made, it could very well become a classic. As Sam often said to Sadie, “Why make anything if you don’t believe it could be great?”