“You’re an asshole,” Simon said.
“Whoa, Simon. Calm down,” Ant said.
“He went to Harvard. He should stop pretending like he’s down with the people.” Simon turned back to Sam. “You’re being perverse. There are tons of cryptic titles in games: Metal Gear Solid. Suikoden. Crash Bandicoot. Grim Fandango. Final Fantasy. They work because they sound cool.”
“But Love Doppelg?ngers does not sound cool,” Sam said.
“The whole game is literally a love story with doppelg?ngers, so we should have a title that reflects that,” Simon said. “And people do know what a doppelg?nger is.”
“Honestly, I don’t think most people do,” Sam said.
“Well, maybe we don’t want those people to play our game, then,” Ant said, coming to his partner’s defense with exactly the wrong argument.
“No, we want everyone to buy this game,” Sam said. “Simon. Ant. Listen, we love this game. It’s your game, and we completely believe in you as artists. But we want the game to sell a million copies. Do you want to cut off the game’s legs over a completely unsubstantiated conjecture that kids in Montana know the word ‘doppelg?nger’？”
Sadie thought Sam sounded exactly like Dov the day he’d told them Ichigo needed to be a boy. She felt a bit sorry for Simon and Ant.
The boys turned to her. “Sadie,” Ant said, “what do you think?”
Sadie knew they trusted her more than Sam, and she wanted to side with them. “I think,” she said, “that Americans hate umlauts. Sorry, guys.”
Simon and Ant exchanged looks. “She’s right,” Ant said.
“Fine,” Simon said. “What are we going to call it, then?”
Sam called a company meeting to brainstorm new titles. He rolled out the trusty whiteboard that had traveled with them from Cambridge to Los Angeles. At this point, the whiteboard was no longer white, and its permanent palimpsest was an archive of Unfair’s last five years. Marx said to Sam, “We can afford a new whiteboard, you know.”
But Sam resisted throwing the whiteboard out. He felt it possessed a talismanic power. “Not one that says ‘Property of the Harvard Science Center’ on the side.”
“Well, right,” Marx said. “Even better, then, because it won’t be a monument to your moral turpitude.”
“Okay,” Sam said to the assembled employees of Unfair. “No one leaves until we’ve got a new title. No idea too stupid.” He brandished his dry-erase marker like a sword, and he wrote their suggestions on the board.
Love Doubles
Love Strangers
Love Stranger High School
High School Love Doubles
The Doppelg?nger
The Doppelg?nger Who Loved Me
Doubles High
Couples High
Wormhole Love Story
Wormhole High
I Am in Love with a Doppelg?nger
The Doppelg?nger’s Love Story
Love Tunnels
Dirty Love Tunnels
Dark and Dirty Love Tunnels
Dark and Dirty High School Love Tunnels
Sexy High
Dirty Sexy High
Dirty Crazy Sexy High
And about two hundred more titles that were variations on, or de-evolutions of, the same.
“These are awful,” Sam said, after they had been at it for around two hours. “They’re great for a porno or an unpublished German novel about pedophilia, but horrible for a four-quadrant video game.”
During sex with Zoe that night, Marx was still ruminating about titles for Love Doppelg?ngers, and that made him think about his own high school years at the International School of Tokyo. Marx had been the captain of the chess team, and the team had gone across town to compete with another high school chess team. （Marx’s school was number two in Tokyo; the other team, number one.） When they arrived at the other high school, they found that the building was almost identical to their high school, but with everything in reverse. The high schools must have been built at the same time and from the same architectural plans. The team had joked that maybe they would find alternate versions of themselves and their teachers in the buildings. The captain of the other chess team had introduced himself to Marx quite formally: “Team Captain Watanabe, I am your counterpart.” He could still hear the Katakana in the way the boy had pronounced the English loanword “counterpart.”
For the rest of their lovemaking, Marx could barely concentrate. He didn’t want to forget the word “counterpart,” but he also didn’t want to interrupt sex with Zoe to write it down. But Zoe could sense Marx’s distance. “Where are you?” she asked.
Counterpart High came out the second week of February 2001 and was an instant best seller for Unfair. By its third week of release, Counterpart High, or CPH, as it was known by fans, had significantly outsold Both Sides, and Marx immediately set the boys to making a sequel. Unlike Sadie, Simon and Ant liked sequels and didn’t see them as a sellout. They claimed that they had imagined CPH as a quartet anyway—a game for each year of high school.
By its tenth week of release, CPH was the best-selling PC game in America. PlayStation and Xbox ports were already in the works, and there was talk of porting it to Nintendo.
By the end of the year, CPH would outsell the original Ichigo.
The staff who had worked on Both Sides were moved over to CPH2. Until they could lease additional office space, Sadie ceded her office to Simon and Ant, and moved down the hall, to share with Marx. When Marx needed privacy, Sadie would use Sam’s office, or she would walk home to Clownerina. Sadie didn’t mind losing her office. She and Sam hadn’t settled on an idea for their next game, and she wasn’t working much anyway. They occasionally tossed concepts back and forth, but nothing seemed to inspire either of them to action. Sam occasionally floated the idea of making Ichigo III, but Sadie thought that felt like retreat. For the first time in five years, they didn’t actively work on a game.
Sadie was not, by nature, ungenerous, and she didn’t begrudge Counterpart High its success. She felt excited for Marx, her partner, and his ability to spot talent. She felt excited that her company was going to be significantly in the black for 2001, despite the disappointing sales of Both Sides. She felt, perhaps, old. She was still only twenty-five, but until that point, she had always been the youngest in any room she’d been in, and she had derived power from that. Even though Simon and Ant were only a handful of years younger than her, they seemed like they were from a different generation than Sadie and Sam. They didn’t have the same issues she had. They liked sequels! They didn’t care about building their own engines, or who got credit for what, or where a good idea came from. They had been playing games since they were in diapers. Their presence, in combination with the failure of Both Sides, made her feel ancient and out of touch.
Though Sadie didn’t see it that way, Counterpart High was her accomplishment, too. The game had been built, in part, using Sadie’s engine, and Counterpart High: Sophomore Year, would be built on an improved version of Oneiric. The tech Sadie had created was worth more than the game she had created it for. When Marx came to her with the idea to use Oneiric for Counterpart High, Sadie agreed. She liked the game’s pitch, and she liked Simon and Ant. How could she not like them? They reminded her of Sam and herself. Although a difference between the boys and her team was that Simon and Ant were lovers, too. She’d watch them working and would feel a touch of…It was hard for her to articulate what. A nostalgia for something that had never been? An envy at their intimacy? She wondered what it would have been like if Sam had been her lover. It wasn’t as if she had never thought of it. But Sam had always been so guarded—he was a boy, and also a windowless and doorless tower. She had never found his entrances. She had never kissed him except on the cheek or the forehead. She had, in fourteen years, only intentionally touched him a handful of times, and he had always seemed uncomfortable when she did. And in the end, she had decided she preferred being his creative partner to being his lover. There were so many people who could be your lover, but, if she was honest with herself, there were relatively few people who could move you creatively. Still, when she watched Simon and Ant, she felt that their personal relationship was riskier than her and Sam’s, though maybe it was more rewarding, too.