“There was the particularly writerly challenge of trying to figure out the exact set of words that will unlock the answer,” she laughs. Did her interest in these extremely textual games hint at her future as a writer? “I remember thinking these games were so beautiful and intricate, it seemed like a really new kind of storytelling.” They were famous for their user inputs – players had to type in phrases such as “Go north” or “Pick up dagger” to solve puzzles. Later, she discovered the graphic adventure games of Sierra, the pioneering company behind legendary Space Quest and King’s Quest games.
Now I finally had somebody to play with.” I remember playing those games and thinking they were a solution to a problem I had throughout my youth, which is that I was an only child. “It was titles like Alley Cat and Jumpman. “He was a maths genius who got tired of academia and decided he wanted to make money in computers.” One day in the early 80s, he brought home a work computer that was pre-loaded with games.
“His background is pretty much the same as Sam’s,” she says. Both her parents worked for IBM, where her father was a programmer.
Games are a subject she was born to write about. It’s also been a resounding success, shooting straight into the New York Times bestseller list and earning her an interview on Jimmy Fallon. It is a künstlerroman for the digital age, an engrossing meditation on creativity and love and perhaps the first novel to wrestle with the culture and meaning of this often-misunderstood medium. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the story of two programmers, Sam and Sadie, who set up a studio in the mid-1990s and over the course of a decade, make interesting games while their lives and relationships entwine in complex, often heartbreaking ways. “I was about three years old at the time and I remember thinking, wouldn’t it just be perfect if I wasn’t limited to a single quarter … if I could just keep playing this game for ever and ever?” Now 44, the veteran author has written her first novel about games. Her first experience, she recalls, was playing Pac-Man at the Honolulu hotel where her grandmother ran a jewellery store. G ames have always been a part of writer Gabrielle Zevin’s life.
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