“I’ll do whatever you want,” he said.
“Okay, Sam,” she said. “Opus it is.”
* * *
—
Once Ichigo had become a real boy, his identity and Sam’s identity became more and more inseparable. People beyond Aaron Opus started to say Sam looked like Ichigo—he did, somewhat. They ate up Sam’s colorful and tragic biography: the childhood injury and playing video games as a way to be invincible, the Korean grandfather with the pizza parlor and the Donkey Kong machine. They tried to find ways in which Sam’s biography and Ichigo’s overlapped. Both had been separated from their parents at young ages. Sam was Asian, and Ichigo was Asian—in 1997, no one made the distinction between Japanese and half-Korean; that Sam was Asian was good enough. Because people—critics, gamers, the Opus marketing department—could more easily find Sam in the game, Ichigo became Sam’s creation, not Sadie’s, and as such, he became the game’s auteur. （As for his relationship to Sadie, they were neither siblings nor married/divorced people nor dating nor had they ever dated, and thus, people found their relationship too mystifying and non-relatable to be worth exploring.）
As part of their promotion, Opus sent Sam to all the game conferences, which were much smaller affairs in those days. Sadie could have chosen to go along with him, but she felt as if her time was better spent at the new Unfair Games offices （fluorescent lighted and industrial carpeted, but no longer in Marx’s living room at least）。 She was simultaneously supervising the Ichigo sequel and completing her BS at MIT. Besides, Sam liked the attention more than she did. She didn’t begrudge him this: he liked interviews; he liked bloviating to a crowd; he liked having his photo taken. Someone had to do it, and Sadie felt uncomfortable speaking about the work—the work, she naively felt, should speak for itself. Sadie was twenty-two when Ichigo was launched, and she hadn’t figured out who she was in public yet. （She barely knew who she was in private.） There were so few prominent female game designers, and there wasn’t exactly a playbook for how a female game designer was supposed to present herself. But the fact is, no one at Opus was pushing Sadie to put herself forward either. The men at Opus wanted Sam to be the face of Ichigo, and so he was. The gaming industry, like many industries, loves its wonder boys.
Still, Sadie had to concede, if only to herself: it wasn’t only that Sam liked promotion; he was better at it than she was. Before the game’s launch, they had done a joint appearance at a sales conference in Boca Raton. It had been the biggest crowd they had ever spoken to, around five hundred people. Sam had been nervous, but Sadie hadn’t been nervous at all. He had paced around the makeshift greenroom up until the moment they were called on stage.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Sam had said.
“You’ll be fine.” Sadie had squeezed his hand and poured him a glass of water. “It’s a hotel ballroom and a couple of hundred nerds.”
“I don’t like so many eyes on me,” Sam had said. He raked his fingers through his hair, which had become a Jewfro in the Florida humidity.
But as soon as they got on the dais, Sam’s nerves disappeared, and he transformed into the world’s most entertaining talk-show guest. When Sadie was asked a question—something like “How did you two meet?”—she gave a specific answer, usually no more than two sentences. “Well, we’re both from Los Angeles,” Sadie said. “And we both liked to game.”
When Sam was asked a question, he turned it into a novella. The story could go on for fifteen minutes and take an extended detour into childhood without anyone ever seeming the slightest bit bored. “On the day I met Sadie, I hadn’t spoken to anyone for six weeks, literally six weeks. But that’s a whole other story. I’ll tell you some other time when we’re better friends. But the main thing you need to know is, Sadie couldn’t get Mario on top of the flagpole. This was before the internet. You couldn’t just cheat. You had to know someone who knew…” The crowd leaned forward when he spoke, laughed at his jokes, spontaneously broke into applause. They loved him. He was more handsome in front of a crowd; his limp, less apparent; his voice, warm and authoritative. It was as if all these years Sam had been waiting for an audience. Sadie marveled at his transformation. Where had her introverted partner gone? Who was this raconteur? Who was this clown?
And next to him, Sadie felt herself diminish.
3
Ichigo II: Go, Ichigo, Go came out in November 1998, almost a year after Ichigo: A Child of the Sea. In the second game, Ichigo’s little sister, Hanami, is lost in yet another storm, and Ichigo, now age eleven, must find her. The second game sold modestly better than the first, but it was largely seen to be coasting on the original’s reputation and strong sales. Most critics, including Sadie and Sam, thought the game was creatively a step backward. It wasn’t that the second Ichigo was a bad game, but what it felt like was more of the same. Ichigo II didn’t take the Ichigo character in a new direction; it didn’t push things graphically, technically, or story-wise.
On the night Sadie told them that she didn’t want to make a third Ichigo, Marx and Sam had just returned from a monthlong Ichigo II promotional tour. It was one of the longest separations the three of them had had since the summer when everything had begun. “I feel like the series has run its course,” she said. “I feel like there isn’t anything left for us to do creatively.” They were having dinner back at the Kennedy Street apartment that Sam and Marx still shared.
“So, what do you want to make instead?” Marx asked.
“I have a couple of ideas,” Sadie said. “But I feel like this is a different discussion.”
“We can get out the old whiteboard anytime,” Marx said.
“Hold on,” Sam said. Up until this point, he had been listening quietly. “We can’t leave Ichigo this way, Sadie. We didn’t have time to make a great Ichigo II because of Opus’s arbitrary timeline. Don’t you want to make a third game that’s great?”
“Maybe someday,” Sadie said.
“I mean, he’s our child,” Sam said. “You can’t abandon our child in a shitty sequel.”
“Samson,” Sadie said, in a warning voice. “I can.”
Sam stood up, wincing.
“Are you all right?” Marx asked.
“Just tired,” Sam said. “Sadie, you don’t get to determine by yourself what we do next. If we aren’t going to make Ichigo III, which I think we should, you have to give us some idea of what it is you’d like to do instead.”
“Sam, your foot is bleeding through your sock,” Marx said.
“Yeah, it’s been doing that a little,” Sam said, unconcerned.
“You need to have a doctor look at that.”
“Marx, fuck off about my foot, okay? I’ll take care of it.” Sam hated when his maladies became a topic of discussion.
“Don’t abuse Marx. He’s trying to make sure you don’t end up unconscious in the street again,” Sadie said.
“I’m fine,” Marx said. “Honestly.”
“You should apologize,” Sadie insisted.