Review:
Content warnings for so many things: miscarriage, gun violence, suicide, drug use, and probably more things I'm forgetting.
This is the story of Sam Masur and Sadie Green, their friendship, and the games they eventually make with each other. Sam and Sadie first meet as kids, in a hospital - Sadie is there because her sister is getting treatment for cancer, and Sam is there recovering from multiple surgeries to piece one of his feet back together after the car accident that took his mother's life. They bond instantly over games, although Sam eventually breaks their friendship off after he discovers something Sadie was keeping from him.
Years later, Sam is studying math at Harvard while Sadie is studying game design at MIT. They accidentally run into each other and have a brief but friendly conversation, after which Sadie hands Sam a disk with a game she made. The game blows Sam away, and he becomes determined to team up with her and design a game together. First, though, he has to help her with the deep depression she's currently dealing with.
Together, Sadie and Sam create a game called Ichigo. Over the next couple decades or so, in the midst of various ups and downs in their friendship, they start a company together and create more games. Although they enjoy bouncing ideas off each other, they don't always mesh well personally and professionally.
I had seen this book a few times, and considered it, but always passed it by because I couldn't really tell what genre it was. If it was supposed to be romance (it wasn't), it sounded like it'd be filled with lots of annoying breakups. In reality, it was more like historical fiction focused on game development, orbiting around a core friendship that had some toxic aspects. The main reason I ended up reading it was because my book club selected it.
Initially, I liked Sam well enough. I appreciated the effort he put into helping Sadie when she was weighed down by depression (although I had cause to rethink that part of the book later on). Sadie was less appealing. In fact, she was responsible for my first multi-week period of not really wanting to read more of the book. The thing that first fractured her and Sam's friendship was that she'd logged their 609 hours of friendship as volunteer hours with her church. Granted, she was only 12 years old or so, and kids make mistakes, but she was warned by her grandmother that this would probably go badly and she still did it. It especially irked me that, years later, Sam and others decided that young Sam had probably overreacted. Yeah, no.
Sam and Sadie were extremely frustrating "friends" - they meshed together well in terms of what they liked about games and gaming, but when it came to actually caring about each other as people, it was amazing the things they let slide and/or never talked about. Sadie, for example, should've been the first person to notice that Sam's foot was doing worse than usual, but instead it was Marx (a nice, rich college friend of theirs who funded a lot of their initial work) who noticed and pushed Sam to do something about it. Then there were the revelations about things Sam knew about Sadie that he did nothing about - again, it was Marx who noticed that worrisome things were going on, and Marx who made an attempt to talk to Sadie about it.
While I agree with readers who think that Marx was probably the most boring character in the book, what with how generally nice, supportive, and agreeable he was, I liked him for being an actual functional person who cared about other people. Without Marx, Sadie and Sam would likely have done or said something to each other that would have fractured their friendship again even sooner (although maybe that would have been a good thing).
As frustrating as I found the characters to be, I did get a nice endorphin rush every time a real-world game I knew about was mentioned. That said, the video game history aspects had some issues. A lot of the real-world nostalgia was rooted in games released in the '80s and '90s, but Sam and Sadie's games, as described, tended to remind me more of games released in the 2000s (often indie games). For example, Both Sides (created by Sam and Sadie in either the late '90s or early 2000s) had elements that made me think of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (2006) and Fran Bow (2015). (Speaking of which, the most entertaining aspect of this book, for me, was trying to map Sam and Sadie's fictional games to their possible real-life inspirations.)
I doubt I'd have read this if it hadn't been one of my book club's picks...and while I'd have missed out on some fun gaming nostalgia, I don't know that that aspect was good enough to make up for all of the author's efforts at emotional manipulation and the decades of drama that was Sam and Sadie's supposed friendship. It wasn't necessarily a bad book, but I'm glad to be done with it.
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