“That’s an enormous hit,” Sadie said.
“It would have sold twice that if I hadn’t made the Wraith a girl. But I didn’t have me as an adviser.”
Sadie was shredding a piece of notebook paper into a tidy pile. Dov put his hand over her hand to stop her.
“Listen guys, it’s not my game. It’s up to you. It’s just my advice. If the ‘them’ thing is important to you, leave it. If you want Ichigo to be a girl, fine. The great thing for you is, it’s a brilliant game and you have all the options. We can table this issue until the publishers weigh in, if you want.”
Ichigo’s top two offers were from Cellar Door Games, where Sadie had been an undistinguished intern, and Opus Interactive, the gaming division of the Austin, Texas–based PC company, Opus Computers.
Cellar Door didn’t see Ichigo’s gender as an issue. Cellar Door was a young company, run by recent MIT grads, and they thought the genderless Ichigo was “edgy and cool.” They offered a relatively modest advance, a generous profit-sharing agreement, and an additional advance for their next game, which did not have to be a sequel to Ichigo. “We don’t just want to be in the Ichigo business,” Jonas Lippman, the twenty-nine-year-old CEO of Cellar Door, said. “We want to be in, uh, your business. Sorry, that came out weird. I didn’t know if your company has a name yet.”
Opus Computers offered a much larger advance—five times as large. They were launching a new gaming laptop, the Opus Wizardware, and their plan was to preload Ichigo on every Opus Wizardware PC sold during the Christmas 1997 season. They thought Ichigo, with its stylish, clean graphics and character design, and its emotional, family-friendly story, was the perfect game to sell gaming laptops to those who didn’t think it was possible to play great games on anything but a console. They wanted a sequel to Ichigo, delivered in time for the Christmas 1998 season, for which they would pay twice as much money. And yes, to the all-male acquisitions team from Texas, Ichigo was definitely a boy—there had never been a question.
Sadie wanted to go with Cellar Door. She preferred the looser terms of their deal, and the truth was, she hadn’t liked the Opus guys. Opus had flown the four of them down to Texas to meet the heads of the gaming division. Aaron Opus, the fifty-year-old, handlebar mustachioed, cowboy-hat-boots-bolo-tie-silver-bullhorn-buckle-Canadian-tuxedo-wearing head of the company, had surprised everyone by showing up at the meeting. Later, back at the hotel, Sadie commented to Dov that Aaron Opus looked like he did all his shopping at the barn-sized western wear stores that dotted the road from the Austin airport. But Dov found Aaron Opus delightful. “I love that Americana shit,” he said.
“It’s a costume,” Sadie protested. “Opus is from Connecticut. He went to Yale.”
“I love this guy! I’m stopping at one of those stores before we go back,” Dov said. “Real men wear at least three different kinds of dead animals.”
“Gross,” Sadie said.
At the meeting, Aaron Opus apologized if he looked haggard, but he’d stayed up for two nights playing Ichigo. “Everyone knows you already, Mr. Mizrah,” he said to Dov. Then he turned and addressed himself to Sam, “So, you’re the programmer?”
“I’m a programmer,” Sam said. “But Sadie’s the programmer.”
“We designed the game together,” Sadie said.
Aaron Opus nodded. He studied Sam’s face, and then he studied Sadie’s face, and then he turned his attention back to Sam.
“The little fella, Ichigo. He looks a lot like you,” Aaron Opus said. He nodded some more, as if deciding something. “Mm-hmm. You’re the face of the game, I reckon.”
When they got back to Cambridge, they exhaustively went over the two offers. Sadie said she liked Cellar Door because it didn’t require them to make a sequel, and because she’d felt Cellar Door was more of a chemistry fit. Sam said he didn’t even understand why they were considering Cellar Door when Opus had offered so much more money. Dov said both were good offers, but different paths, and it depended on what they wanted. He added that since the profit-sharing terms Cellar Door was offering were better, they might even make more money with Cellar Door in the long run. Marx said he, too, liked the creative freedom of the Cellar Door offer, but he felt the Opus deal had the potential to make Ichigo bigger. Opus had guaranteed that Ichigo would be featured prominently in the multimillion-dollar advertising campaign for the Opus Wizardware PC. If the game did what they thought it could do, Opus saw animation, Macy’s Thanksgiving balloons, and tons of merch in Ichigo’s future. Cellar Door didn’t have the apparatus or the money to make that happen, not anytime soon.
By the end of the night, Marx, Dov, and Sam were on the side of Opus. Sadie was the only holdout for Cellar Door.
“It’s life-changing money,” Sam said. “Honestly.”
“But I don’t want to spend another year of my changed life making an Ichigo sequel,” Sadie said.
“I get that,” Marx said. “And I support Sadie, if that’s what she wants. You guys are the creatives on this, so the two of you have to decide.”
Sam asked Sadie to go out onto the balcony, so they could collogue. He was still in a cast and he couldn’t get around very well; otherwise, he would have preferred to go on a walk with her. He felt like he thought better and was more persuasive when he was in motion.
Sadie spoke first. “The Cellar Door advance is fine, and they truly understand the game we’re trying to make,” she reasoned. “And we’ll be able to spend next year making something new, something better. And how can you be so quick to sell out the thing we were trying to do with Ichigo’s gender? I thought that was important to you.”
“It is, but it’s so much money,” Sam said.
“Why do you suddenly care about money? You’re twenty-two, how much money do you need? If you wanted to make money, you never should have made the game. You could have done Harvard recruiting, and ended up with a six-figure job at Bear Stearns, like everyone else in your class.”
“You’ve never been poor,” Sam said, “so you don’t understand.” Sam paused. He hated admitting vulnerabilities, even to Sadie. “I’ve got student loans. I owe a ton of money for the emergency room visit and the surgery on my ankle and foot, and if I don’t start paying it back, the bills will go to my grandparents. At the moment, I’ve got negative dollars in my bank account. Marx is paying the rent, and I’m eating off the butt ends of credit cards. If we take the Cellar Door offer, I won’t have anything to live on while we make the next game. I need this, Sadie, but honestly, I also think it’s the better offer, the one that can really blow Ichigo up. And I know you must see that. I think the real reason you don’t like them is because they thought I was the programmer.”
Sadie sat down on the balcony. She loathed the Opus guys, and the thought of making an Ichigo sequel for them made her feel like she was being shackled and blindfolded and gagged and locked into a duffel bag and tossed into the bottom of the sea.
Sam was struggling to lower himself to sit down next to her. Sadie gave him her hand, but even with her assistance, he still landed a bit hard. He put his head in the crook of her shoulder; the freight was in proportion to the groove.