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The novel courses their development as creative partners and co-founders of their studio, Unfair Games. Ichigo is a breakout hit.īut Sam and Sadie don’t always work well together. When they work well together, Sadie and Sam work incredibly well. He’s the first to say when something isn’t working, and knows when to cut corners instead of pursuing an elusive perfectionism. Sam is, unlike Sadie, a self-taught programmer. Sadie is artistic and rigorous – she decides that the game’s aesthetic should be influenced by Hokusai’s famous woodblock prints of waves, and she painstakingly programs game sequences.

The aim of the game is to help the child, named Ichigo, navigate back to shore. Here’s the premise: a child (the child’s gender is unstipulated in the game) is playing on a beach when a freak wave washes them out to sea. The first game they make is called Ichigo. He and Sadie Green need to be making video games together. By the time he has finished playing, Sam’s mind is made up. In fact, they stay up all night playing it. Sam, and his roommate Marx, play the game. It contains a prototype of a video game she has been working on. Impulsively, Sadie presses a floppy disk into Sam’s hands. In their twenties, though, they bump into each other at a train station. He stops speaking and the two fall out of touch. But when Sam discovers Sadie has been using him as a community service project – even though Sadie has long since begun to consider Sam not only a friend but her best friend – he is furious.

Sadie and Sam spend nearly a whole summer together, getting to know each other, crafting elaborate inside jokes and, always, gaming. Sadie’s mum reminds Sadie that she needs to do community service for her upcoming bat mitzvah – these visits to Sam could count towards that. The nurse asks Sadie if she’d be willing to meet Sam in the games room regularly. Instead, he’s been absorbed in gameplay and in drawing intricate mazes on paper in the style of M.C Escher. As a nurse later informs Sadie, Sam has spoken to no-one since the accident – no-one except Sadie. This is more significant than it might appear. A keen gamer herself, Sadie strikes up a conversation, and soon the two are amiably gaming and chatting. Sadie has just wandered into the games room to find Sam in the middle of rescuing Princess Peach. Sam, as the cage-like contraption around his foot attests, is recovering from devastating injuries sustained in a car crash that also killed his mother. Sadie is visiting her older sister Alice, who is 13 and has leukemia. But these two kids – their names, by the way are Sam Masur and Sadie Green – aren’t sitting in a living room. It’s Los Angeles, 1987 and two kids, both eleven years old, are sitting on a sofa and playing Super Mario Bros.