“He’s reached Gomibako,” Sadie said.
A great deal depended on Dov’s reaction. Dov had connections and influence in the industry—if he liked it, he could take it to his or a different publisher. He could bring attention to Ichigo in a way and with a speed that Sadie, Sam, and Marx, on their own, couldn’t.
“Why don’t you come back here?” Sam said. “We can go to the movies. Marx says Mars Attacks! is playing at Sony Fresh Pond tonight.”
“You’re good to go out?”
“I have to go out sometime, Sadie. We’ll take a cab. We’ll go slow.”
“No skipping?”
“No skipping, no reciting of poetry. I promise.”
Sadie looked at her shackled wrist. “I should stay here,” she said. “In case he needs me,” she added.
She didn’t have a book to read, and while she had recently urinated, she was already starting to be thirsty. She pulled the sheets up over herself, as best she could, and she tried to go to sleep, but she wasn’t tired, and it was awkward to sleep with her arm over her head.
There was no question that they had needed Ulysses, but it still bothered Sadie that she had had to use it. Dov was a producer on Ichigo, and he was so well known that she worried that people would think her work was his work. That they wouldn’t know where her work began and his work ended.
On this point, Sadie wouldn’t end up being entirely wrong. Consider Dov, in an interview on the Gamedepot blog for the release of Dead Sea II.
gamedepot: Another game that’s been making a big splash this year is Ichigo, which employs your Ulysses engine to great effect. Tell us the story of how you became involved with Ichigo.
d.m.: Well, Sadie [Green, programmer and designer, Ichigo] was my student. She’s brilliant—always has been. I’m, like, not in the engine-selling business. I don’t have a great interest in selling my tools to other so-called designers. Personally, I think the sharing of engines has had a chilling effect on creativity across all games. It’s lazy. The games start to look the same, have the same mechanics and the same presumptive physics, etc. But I saw what she and Sammy [Masur, programmer and designer, Ichigo] were trying to do, and it seemed really special to me, and like something I wanted to be involved with. I thought that Ulysses could help them. Listen, Ulysses shouldn’t take away from anything Sadie and Sammy did. The amount of work those two kids did was astounding. I cite them as an example to my students of how much two kids and a couple of computers can get done on their own. Game companies have gotten too big and impersonal. You have ten guys doing texture layers, and ten guys doing modeling and ten guys doing backgrounds, and someone else is writing the story, and someone else is writing the dialogue, and literally, no one ever talks to each other. They’re like zombies, with their heads in their cubicles. It’s a [expletive] nightmare.
gamedepot: But you can see your influence. In the opening storm sequence, for example.
d.m.: Meh. Maybe it’s there, maybe not. It’s there if you know to look for it.
When Dov finally came back into the bedroom after his first play of Ichigo, there were tears in his eyes. “It’s fucking beautiful, Sadie.”
“It’s good?” she said. She wanted to hear him say it.
“Good?” he said. “You crazy brilliant kid. You astonish me. You amaze me. To think, this little, tiny person can make something like this.” Dov let tears run down his face and he made no attempt to wipe them away. Seeing Dov cry made Sadie cry, too. She felt different than she had when she’d heard Marx’s reaction—Marx was a fan. With Dov, she felt nothing short of relief. She felt as if the tension she had been holding in her body for ten months, since last March, when Sam had asked her to make the game, was suddenly gone. She didn’t know what would happen with the game—if it would be a quiet shareware release, if it would get a big publishing deal. She almost didn’t care. She had made something that Dov Mizrah admired, and for now, that was enough.
She wanted to go to Dov, but she was still handcuffed to his bed. She got on her knees, still naked, and she held out her free hand to him and he squeezed it. “I love you,” he said.
“I love you,” she said.
“And I love Ichigo. I want to talk to Sammy and Marx first thing tomorrow. We’re all gonna make so much money.” He started spinning out his plans for Ichigo, speaking as quickly as an auctioneer. He was pacing the room, bouncing on one foot, gesturing passionately. She had never seen him so excited about anything.
“Dov,” she said. “Would you mind…？” She shook her chain.
III
UNFAIR GAMES
1
No one was entirely sure who had come up with the name Unfair Games, though all three of them, at various times, took credit. Marx thought he’d named it after a line he liked from The Tempest: “Yes, for a score of kingdoms, you should wrangle, and I would call it fair play.” Sadie didn’t think this made any sense—“fair” was not “unfair”; “play” was not “games.” She was sure Unfair Games derived from the fact that “It’s unfair” had been the unofficial mantra of her childhood. Sadie repeated it so often that her mother had threatened to deduct a quarter from her allowance each time the phrase was uttered. Sam, for his part, was certain that he had named Unfair Games: when he had woken up in the hospital with that broken ankle, he could remember thinking that the best thing about games is that they could be fairer than life. A good game, like Ichigo, was hard, but fair. The “unfair game” was life itself. He swore he’d written the name on a sheet of paper by his bedside, but no one would ever locate this sheet of paper. And where credit was concerned, Sam’s stories were often apocryphal, or at the very least, reverse engineered.
2
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.”