Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow Plot Summary

Introduction

The sun was setting over the horizon as two children huddled around a flickering screen, their faces illuminated by the soft glow of pixelated adventures. Their laughter echoed through the room as they passed the controller back and forth, building worlds together one game at a time. In that moment, something magical was happening – a friendship was being forged through the shared language of play, a bond that would evolve and transform through decades of technological change and personal growth. Friendship in the digital age follows patterns both ancient and entirely new. As we navigate an increasingly complex landscape of human connection, the stories of those who build worlds together – both virtual and real – offer us profound insights into loyalty, creativity, and the sometimes painful evolution of human bonds. Through intimate portraits of creative partnerships that span decades, we witness how the games we play together shape our identities, challenge our perceptions, and ultimately teach us about the delicate balance between connection and independence. These relationships, with their moments of brilliant collaboration and heartbreaking conflict, mirror our own struggles to maintain authentic connections in a world where the boundaries between virtual and real have never been more permeable.

Chapter 1: First Encounters: The Hospital Game Room Connection

Sam and Sadie first met in a children's hospital game room when they were eleven. Sadie was visiting her sister Alice, who was being treated for leukemia. After being banished from Alice's room following an argument, Sadie wandered into the game room where she found Sam playing Super Mario Bros. He was skilled – landing Mario at the top of the flagpole, something Sadie had never mastered. Without looking at her, he offered her the controller: "You want to play the rest of this life?" Their connection was immediate and profound. Sam, recovering from a car accident that had shattered his foot into twenty-seven pieces, hadn't spoken to anyone in six weeks. Yet with Sadie, words flowed easily. They discussed the moral implications of shooting Goombas and ducks in games, shared personal stories, and found refuge in play. "There is no more intimate act than play, even sex," Sam would controversially say years later in an interview. Their friendship deepened through hours of gaming together, but ended abruptly when Sam discovered Sadie had been logging their time together as community service for her Bat Mitzvah. Feeling betrayed, he called her a word he'd never used before and vowed never to see her again. Six years passed before they reconnected by chance in a subway station, where Sadie pressed a disk into his hands – a game she had created called Solution. Years later, when they began working on Ichigo, their creative process revealed their complementary strengths. Sam was the visionary who could tell stories that captivated audiences. Sadie was the technical genius who could bring those visions to life. "It wasn't until Sam said her own idea back to her—slightly modified, improved, synthesized, rearranged—that she could tell if it was good," the narrative reveals about their process. Their partnership transcended conventional relationships. It wasn't romantic, though others often assumed it must be. It was something rarer – a creative bond where each amplified the other's talents. As Sam explained to Marx when asked if there was something between them: "It's more than romantic. It's better than romance. It's friendship." This creative symbiosis allowed them to build worlds together that neither could have created alone, demonstrating how the most powerful partnerships often exist in that undefined space where collaboration becomes something greater than the sum of its parts.

Chapter 2: Ichigo's Birth: Balancing Art and Commercial Reality

The summer air hung heavy with possibility as Sam and Sadie huddled around a stolen whiteboard in Marx's apartment. Their mission: create a video game in three months. With Sam's artistic vision and Sadie's programming prowess, they sketched out ideas day after day, but nothing felt right. The whiteboard became a rainbow of rejected concepts, their markers squeaking in frustration. Then came the breakthrough. While attending a production of Twelfth Night, watching Marx perform as Orsino, they witnessed a spectacular staged shipwreck. Through the theatrical fog and laser lights, Sadie leaned over to Sam and whispered, "Our game should start with a shipwreck. Or maybe a storm." Sam nodded enthusiastically, "Yes, a child is lost at sea." In that moment, Ichigo was born – a young child washed away by a tsunami, armed with only a bucket and shovel, trying to find their way home. What began as a summer project stretched into months of relentless work. Sadie programmed until she burst a blood vessel in her eye. Sam typed until his fingertips bled. When they struggled with the game's lighting and texture, they turned to Dov Mizrah, Sadie's former professor and ex-lover, who provided his Ulysses engine in exchange for becoming a producer. Their small team expanded to include Marx as producer and Zoe, a brilliant composer who would later win a Pulitzer Prize. The finished game faced its first commercial challenge when Aaron Opus, the cowboy-hat-wearing head of Opus Interactive, insisted Ichigo be explicitly male. "The little fella, Ichigo. He looks a lot like you," he told Sam, ignoring Sadie's presence. Though they had designed Ichigo to be genderless, allowing players to see themselves in the character, the promise of a massive advance and marketing campaign proved too tempting to resist. As Ichigo found commercial success, the team watched their artistic vision slowly transform. The game that began as a meditation on identity and homecoming became a product with sequels, merchandise, and marketing campaigns. Sam became the face of the game – partly because he enjoyed the attention, partly because the industry preferred its wonder boys, and partly because Opus had decided it should be so. The collision between art and commerce is rarely gentle. For creators like Sam and Sadie, success meant watching their creation take on a life beyond their control. Yet this tension – between artistic vision and commercial reality – would become a defining feature of their partnership, teaching them that bringing a game into the world means accepting that it will never again belong solely to its creators.

Chapter 3: Creative Symbiosis: The Sam and Sadie Dynamic

When Sadie and Sam reunited in college, they quickly fell back into their creative rhythm, but with a new maturity. During one late-night session working on Ichigo, Sadie struggled with programming the game's opening tsunami. "What is a storm?" she asked aloud. "It is water, and it is light, and it is wind. And it is how these three elements act on the surfaces they touch." Sam, instead of offering a technical solution, responded with a story about his childhood fear of thunderstorms, which gave Sadie exactly the emotional perspective she needed to code the scene. Their partnership thrived on this complementary exchange – Sam provided the emotional core and narrative vision, while Sadie translated these abstract concepts into functional code. When they disagreed, their arguments were passionate but productive. During one heated debate about Ichigo's movement mechanics, Sam insisted the character should move with childlike awkwardness. Sadie argued for more fluid controls that players would find satisfying. Their compromise – slightly unpredictable movement that players gradually mastered – became one of the game's most praised features. Marx, their third partner and eventual producer, observed their dynamic with fascination. "Watching them work is like watching some weird telepathic dance," he told a journalist years later. "They finish each other's sentences, but they also start arguments in the middle, as if they've been silently disagreeing for hours." This creative tension generated ideas neither would have conceived alone, a phenomenon Marx called "collaborative alchemy." As their careers progressed, this symbiosis evolved. During the development of Both Sides, their second major game, they worked more independently – Sam creating the realistic world of Mapletown while Sadie built the fantasy realm of Myre Landing. The resulting game felt disjointed to critics, who noted it seemed designed by two different people with competing visions. This period of creative separation taught them that their best work emerged from constant dialogue and mutual influence, not parallel development. The Sam and Sadie dynamic illustrates how creative partnerships thrive on complementary differences rather than similarities. Their relationship wasn't always harmonious – they fought, separated, and occasionally wounded each other deeply – but their creative connection remained resilient because each recognized what the other contributed. Their story demonstrates that the most productive collaborations aren't those where partners think alike, but where different perspectives create a productive friction that polishes rough ideas into gems. The magic happens not despite their differences but because of them.

Chapter 4: Identity Through Creation: Games as Self-Expression

When designing Ichigo, Sam and Sadie made a deliberate choice to create a character without a specified gender. "What Sam thought, and I agree, is that gender doesn't matter at that age. So, we never identify Ichigo's gender," Sadie explained to Dov. This artistic decision reflected their belief that players should be able to see themselves in the protagonist, regardless of gender. However, this creative vision collided with market realities when Opus Interactive offered them a deal five times larger than their other option. The catch? Opus saw Ichigo as definitively male. "You want to sell this game in Walmart, right? You want to sell this game to people in the heartland," Dov argued, supporting the change. Despite Sadie's protests that Dead Sea had succeeded with a female protagonist, commercial pressures won out, and Ichigo became a boy. The game's Japanese aesthetic raised questions of cultural appropriation years later. When interviewed about this, Sam responded defensively: "The alternative to appropriation is a world where artists only reference their own cultures... A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own." As a mixed-race person with Korean and Jewish heritage, Sam felt particularly sensitive to these criticisms, noting: "To be half of two things is to be whole of nothing." For Sam, his own identity shaped how he experienced the world. In Koreatown Los Angeles, no one thought he was Korean. In Manhattan, no one thought he was white. His sense of self shifted depending on location, a theme that would later appear in the games he created with Sadie. "The game character, like the self, is contextual," Sadie would later explain in an interview. Identity in game development extends beyond the characters on screen to questions of authorship and recognition. Though Sadie was the primary programmer of Ichigo, Sam became its public face. "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." This gendered dynamic reflected broader patterns in the tech world, where women's contributions often went unrecognized or were attributed to their male colleagues. These experiences illuminate how games, like all art forms, reflect and sometimes reinforce societal biases about identity, even as they attempt to transcend them. The struggle to maintain artistic integrity while navigating commercial demands and cultural sensitivities remains a central challenge for creators seeking to build more inclusive virtual worlds.

Chapter 5: The Price of Success: Personal Costs of Achievement

When Ichigo became a commercial hit, Sam embraced his role as the game's public face. He traveled extensively for promotional events, telling and retelling the story of the game's creation. "It had been telling the same stories over and over again but acting as if he were telling them for the first time," the narrative reveals. "It had been dragging out his personal traumas for the amusement of the game-buying public." The toll wasn't just emotional – his damaged foot began bleeding during a promotional event at FAO Schwarz, a physical manifestation of the price he was paying for success. Meanwhile, Sadie remained at the office, simultaneously supervising the Ichigo sequel and completing her degree at MIT. Though she could have joined the promotional tour, she felt uncomfortable in the spotlight. During their one joint appearance, she noticed how Sam transformed before an audience: "It was as if all these years Sam had been waiting for an audience. Where had her introverted partner gone? Who was this raconteur? Who was this clown?" Standing beside him, she felt herself diminish. Their personal relationships suffered as well. Sadie's relationship with Dov became increasingly toxic. When she finally decided to leave Boston for California with Sam and Marx, Dov reacted with manipulation and control, handcuffing her to the bed – a disturbing escalation of their power dynamic. Even as she packed to leave, he alternated between insults and apologies, a cycle she endured silently while continuing to pack. Sam's health deteriorated as he postponed necessary medical intervention. His orthopedist warned that amputation was inevitable: "The rods are wearing out what's left of his bone and his skin is becoming prone to infection and resistant to healing." Yet Sam refused to address it, insisting he needed to make the new game with Sadie first. "I simply can't make the game and be recovering from having an amputation at the same time," he told Marx, prioritizing work over his physical wellbeing. The success that Sam and Sadie achieved came with sacrifices that extended beyond long hours and creative compromises. Their story illustrates how professional achievement often extracts personal costs that remain invisible to the public. For Sam, it meant physical deterioration and emotional exhaustion. For Sadie, it meant diminished recognition and a toxic relationship. Both paid prices that no amount of commercial success could fully compensate for, revealing the complex reality behind the glossy facade of creative accomplishment.

Chapter 6: Virtual Healing: Games as Emotional Bridges

On a frigid winter night in Manhattan, nine-year-old Sam and his mother Anna witnessed a woman jump from a building, landing at their feet. The woman, eerily, shared Anna's name – she was also Anna Lee. As Sam processed this trauma, his mother took him into a nearby bodega where he found temporary escape playing Ms. Pac-Man. "If you eat the fruit," Sam explained to his mother, "you can kill the ghosts, but only for a little while." This simple game mechanic became a metaphor for his attempt to process what he'd just witnessed – a momentary power over death that the real world couldn't offer. After moving to Los Angeles following this incident, Sam found solace in his grandfather's Donkey Kong machine at the family pizza parlor. "When he could time the little Japanese Italian plumber's jumps and ascend the staircases at the right pace, it felt as if the universe was capable of being ordered," the narrative reveals. For a boy who had seen chaos and mortality up close, games provided a structured world where actions had predictable consequences. Years later, during his hospitalization after the car accident that damaged his foot, Sam explained to Sadie why he wanted to create games: "Sometimes, I would be in so much pain. The only thing that kept me from wanting to die was the fact that I could leave my body and be in a body that worked perfectly for a while—better than perfectly, actually—with a set of problems that were not my own." This sentiment would become central to their game design philosophy. Sadie too found healing through creation. After a period of depression following her breakup with Dov, she poured herself into developing Solution, a game about moral choices and complicity. Later, when designing Ichigo, she wanted the character's movements to feel "buoyant and slightly out of control, like a baby duck trailing after its mother." The design document specified that "the child's body moves the way a body can move before it has felt or even encountered the idea of pain" – perhaps reflecting her own desire to return to a state of innocence. The therapeutic power of virtual worlds lies in their ability to transform trauma into agency. In games, players can face challenges knowing they have the tools to overcome them. For creators like Sam and Sadie, building these worlds offered something even more profound – the chance to construct meaning from their own suffering and share it with others seeking similar escape. Their story demonstrates how the act of creation itself can be healing, allowing traumatic experiences to be processed, transformed, and ultimately transcended through art.

Chapter 7: Restarting the Game: Reconciliation and New Beginnings

Five years after the tragic shooting that took Marx's life, Sadie discovered a new game called Pioneers—an immersive virtual world reminiscent of Oregon Trail but with social elements. Struggling with depression and the challenges of single motherhood, she created a character named Emily Marks, a pregnant woman who settled in the remote Upper Foglands region. Through Emily, Sadie found solace in the simple rhythms of virtual farming and building a life from scratch. Soon, Emily encountered Dr. Edna Daedalus, the town's optometrist. Unlike other non-player characters, Daedalus seemed unusually perceptive and responsive. They developed a friendship over games of Go, philosophical conversations, and shared creative projects. When Daedalus proposed marriage to Emily, Sadie felt a connection she hadn't experienced since Marx's death. The relationship provided comfort in her isolation, though something about Daedalus seemed strangely familiar. As their virtual relationship deepened, Sadie began noticing peculiar details—references to their shared past, literary allusions only Sam would understand, and game mechanics reminiscent of their early collaborations. Eventually, she discovered the truth: Pioneers had been created by Sam specifically for her, and Dr. Daedalus was Sam's avatar. He had built this world hoping she might find it, creating a space where they could reconnect without the weight of their painful history. When confronted through in-game chat, Sam admitted everything. "I built this place for you," he wrote. "After Marx's death, I wanted to make things that reminded me of the old days, of you." Feeling betrayed by the deception, Sadie abandoned Pioneers, leaving her virtual life behind. Yet the experience had already begun healing something within her. Through playing, she had rediscovered her love for games and her capacity for connection. Years later, teaching game design at MIT, Sadie received a Magic Eye book in the mail—a reference to their first reunion at the train station decades earlier. She called Sam, and they cautiously began rebuilding their relationship. "I miss you, Sadie," Sam admitted. "I want to be in your life." Though hesitant, Sadie recognized that their bond, however complicated, remained one of the defining connections of her life. This chapter illustrates how virtual worlds can provide healing spaces when reality becomes too painful. Sam's creation of Pioneers demonstrates that games can be acts of love—environments designed not just for entertainment but for emotional connection and reconciliation. Their story suggests that sometimes we need the distance of virtual interaction to approach wounds too tender to address directly. In building a world for Sadie, Sam found a way to speak to her when words alone would have failed.

Summary

Throughout their intertwined journeys of Sam, Sadie, and Marx, we witness how creative partnerships mirror the complex evolution of human connection itself. Their story reveals that meaningful collaboration requires a delicate balance – between individual expression and shared vision, between creative principles and practical realities, between the worlds we build together and the separate lives we must sometimes lead. Like the characters in their games, they navigate landscapes both familiar and fantastical, facing obstacles that test not just their skills but their understanding of themselves and each other. The most profound insight from their decades-long relationship is that creative partnerships, like all meaningful human connections, must evolve or perish. When Sam and Sadie clung too tightly to old patterns and expectations, their work suffered. When they allowed each other room to grow independently – even when that growth led to temporary separation – they ultimately created richer worlds together. Their story offers hope that even our most difficult relationships can transform rather than end, that conflicts can lead to deeper understanding rather than permanent estrangement, and that the games we play together – whether literal or metaphorical – can teach us how to build better, more compassionate worlds. In the end, what matters most is not the perfect maintenance of any single relationship but the courage to remain open to connection even after disappointment, to recognize that our creative partners, like ourselves, are always in the process of becoming.

About Author

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Gabrielle Zevin

GABRIELLE ZEVIN is a New York Times best-selling novelist whose books have been translated into forty languages.Her tenth novel, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was published by Knopf in July of 2022 and was an instant New York Times Best Seller, a Sunday Times Best Seller, a USA Today Best Seller, a #1 National Indie Best Seller, and a selection of the Tonight Show’s Fallon Book Club. Maureen Corrigan of NPR’s Fresh Air called it, “a big beautifully written novel…that succeeds in being both serious art and immersive entertainment.” Following a twenty-five-bidder auction, the feature film rights to Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow were acquired by Temple Hill and Paramount Studios.The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry spent many months on the New York Times Best Seller List, reached #1 on the National Indie Best Seller List, was a USA Today Best Seller, and has been a best seller all around the world. A.J. Fikry was honored with the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for Fiction, the Japan Booksellers’ Prize, and was long listed for the International Dublin Literary Award, among other honors. To date, the book has sold over five-million copies worldwide. It is now a feature film with a screenplay by Zevin. Young Jane Young won the Southern Book Prize and was one of the Washington Post’s Fifty Notable Works of Fiction.She is the screenwriter of Conversations with Other Women (Helena Bonham Carter) for which she received an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for Best First Screenplay. She has occasionally written criticism for the New York Times Book Review and NPR’s All Things Considered, and she began her writing career, at age fourteen, as a music critic for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Zevin is a graduate of Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.NOTE: Apologies, but Gabrielle doesn't reply to messages on Goodreads.

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