We grow up believing creativity and love are quests with fixed endpoints, but Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow shows how making—and remaking—games, art, and selves is really an infinite respawn.
We measure friendship by winning and losing, yet Gabrielle Zevin’s novel insists the only true victory condition is the stubborn choice to keep playing together, despite grief, ego, and time.
This book argues that play—as design, as collaboration, as the daily act of trying again “tomorrow”—is a radical, intimate way to love people, survive grief, and build meaning when life crashes to desktop.
Zevin grounds her story in the lived texture of game-making (indie production sprints, publisher pressures, merch mania, appropriation debates), while the text embeds faux interviews and acknowledgments citing real development histories and critical discourse around games; the book’s closing notes reference sources from Masters of Doom to Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, and even corrects a meme about Oregon Trail (“You have dysentery” vs. “You have died of dysentery”), revealing the meticulous research behind its fictional studio, Unfair Games.
Best for: readers who love character-driven fiction, the culture of making things (startups, studios, labs), or the artistry of video games without needing to “be a gamer.” Not for: readers seeking tidy romances or one-arc heroes—this book embraces creative mess, moral ambiguity, and the slow, nonlinear grind of collaboration.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Tomorrow. and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin was published by Knopf in July 2022 and quickly became a New York Times, Sunday Times, and USA Today bestseller, later appearing on the NYT list of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.”
It’s a contemporary literary novel steeped in the culture and craft of video game development, blending friendship saga, startup story, and artist-bio realism. The author’s notes situate her influences across game history and criticism—an intertext that keeps the fiction “truthy” about the labor of making.
The novel’s thesis is voiced within its pages: play is intimacy; to make and play is to risk oneself with others, again and again—“There is no more intimate act than play, even sex,” a recurring claim from the in-world interviews and conversations surrounding Sam and Sadie’s games.
2. Background
The book rides a moment when gaming is fully mainstream, but literary fiction still underrepresents developers’ inner lives; critics and interviews around Zevin’s release highlighted how the novel treats games as narrative art and shared culture, not mere distraction. (See Wired’s conversation about empathy and games, and The Guardian’s essay on literature taking gaming seriously.)
Just as crucial: the story draws on the “Oregon Trail Generation” nostalgia and game history that the acknowledgments openly cite, threading real titles (from Hokusai-styled art influences to Metal Gear Solid namechecks) into the fictional catalogue of Unfair Games.
3. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Summary
Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet in a children’s hospital, reconnect by chance in Cambridge years later, and decide to make a game together in a borrowed Harvard-adjacent apartment, jump-starting a decades-spanning creative partnership. Their first major success is Ichigo: A Child of the Sea, a 2D/2.5D side-scroller whose opening image is indelible—“Ichigo…playing with a small bucket and a shovel when the tsunami hits.” The player must bring Ichigo home with “a limited vocabulary,” tools as simple as the bucket and shovel, and a world art-directed with Hokusai-inflected waves and influences ranging from Nara and Miyazaki to Murakami and Glass.
Though the game’s “thousandth” idea arrived after whiteboard sessions and brazenly stolen markers, its elegance crystallizes a core dynamic: Sam’s populist instinct (greatness = reach) and Sadie’s artistic standard (greatness = art), a tension that will power—and poison—their collaboration for years.
Their friend Marx Watanabe, a charismatic actor and connector, becomes producer and ballast—helping incorporate as Unfair Games (the title a pun, an ethos, a Tempest-tinted joke), securing music, smoothing investors (including his exacting father), and playing the social face Sam can’t—or won’t—sustain.
The studio’s rise brings creative sequels, critical debates about appropriation (the Ichigo aesthetic), and internal fractures: Sadie resists being eclipsed by Sam’s public figure; Sam hoards hurts and underestimates what it costs Sadie to navigate a male-coded industry; Marx tries to keep the party together. An in-world Kotaku interview shows Sam wrestling with cultural borrowing: “The alternative to appropriation is a world where…artists only reference their own cultures. I hate that world…”
Then violence—a shooting—shatters the company’s Venice office, and grief remaps the trio’s lives; in one haunting sequence, Sam returns alone to clean literal blood from the floor and draft a plan to comfort employees back into “seemingly frivolous work…worth doing in the face of a random, violent universe.”
From there, the book tracks separations and partial reconciliations, new games and failures, Sadie’s pregnancy and health, and Sam’s evolving status as the more famous half of a duo built on a woman’s genius. Tours for Master of the Revels show Sam basking in crowds while Sadie shrinks at his side—an unflinching depiction of gendered visibility in tech-art fields.
Through it all, the novel returns to its thesis: play is the most intimate collaboration; the only winning move is to keep iterating together, to “fail better,” as a chastened mentor tells Sadie after a flop.
Highlighted takeaways from the whole arc (so you don’t need to flip pages):
• Friendship-as-collaboration trumps romance-as-resolution.
• Game-making is art and labor: vision, budget, publishing calendars, QA, tours, merch, interviews, reviews.
• Appropriation debates don’t vanish with good intent; they demand attention, context, and accountability.
• Grief is an engine that can stall or refuel the work; the studio is a workplace before it’s a myth.
• “To play requires trust,” and trust must be remade each “tomorrow.”
4. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Analysis
4.1 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Characters
Sam Masur
Sam begins as a wounded prodigy (physically and emotionally), a boy who finds his voice through games and later discovers he likes being seen—on stages, in interviews, online; he becomes the face of Unfair, a raconteur who charms rooms and answers big questions about politics, art, and games while limping through private pain.
Yet he’s also defensive, jealous, and resentful of Sadie’s autonomy; he doesn’t merely want to be right—he wants to be indispensable.
The text shows him hungering for applause even as he ricochets between love and control: “They loved him…Who was this raconteur?” Sadie wonders at an event.
Sadie Green
Sadie is the book’s creative conscience—disciplined, exacting, allergic to shooters (“disgusting, immoral, and the disease of an immature society”) even while markets reward them. She can be prickly, and pride sometimes isolates her, but her instinct for form, pacing, and theme is the series’ soul.
She is also the character most visibly punished by success—credited less, booked less, named less—while the press treats Sam as the auteur. The novel refuses a flattening redemption: Sadie’s triumphs coexist with exhaustion, pregnancy sickness at the office door, and the reality of working while grieving.
Marx Watanabe
Marx is the glue—connector, empath, pragmatist, romance to some, ballast to all—whose father’s investor eye and personal story even seed the Ichigo premise (tsunami fear, fishing towns, rain).
He’s equally at home wrangling budgets and whispering comic commentary during Noh theater, embodying the book’s claim that producing is also a creative act. In one devastating passage after the office violence, his absence becomes a negative space that alters everyone’s orbit.
Dynamic
The trio’s relationship is a study in co-authorship: Sam wants scale, Sadie wants elegance, Marx wants continuity—and the book argues that making anything lasting requires that triangle to hold, break, and be rebuilt.
4.2 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Themes & Symbolism
Play as intimacy
The text literalizes play’s intimacy through in-world interviews and community reaction. When a character says, “There is no more intimate act than play,” the line becomes a thesis statement and a dare: can we keep playing with those who hurt us?
Art vs. popularity
“Greatness” divides into reach versus refinement; Sam frames greatness as popular, Sadie as art—an argument rendered in budget meetings, sequel debates, and their very first whiteboard sessions.
Appropriation, influence, and context
The Ichigo aesthetic (Hokusai/Nara/Miyazaki) incites a debate the novel doesn’t solve but refuses to dodge; Sam’s 2017 Kotaku interview is both deflection and confession, insisting on cross-cultural art while acknowledging he’s “a different person” now.
Labor & grief
Zevin dignifies “frivolous work” in the wake of tragedy, staging a pep talk to shell-shocked employees as a moral claim that making fun things can still be work worth doing after violence.
Respawn (Tomorrow)
The title’s Shakespearean echo becomes a design philosophy: the player dies, tries again; the studio ships, patches, tries again; friends hurt each other, apologize, try again.
5. Evaluation
Strengths / pleasant experiences
The novel is astonishingly procedural about game-making—funding pitches, composer hires, production pipelines, press cycles—without losing the heat of human stakes.
The Ichigo concept is one of those rare fictional ideas that feels instantly playable, from the opening tsunami to the design challenge of aging a protagonist over time (a decision the text frames as brand-defying and labor-intensive).
Zevin also writes attention with specificity: tour Q&As that mistake colleagues for couples; press asking Sam big “politics of games” questions while Sadie gets sidelined; merch shelves that metastasize into the architecture of a life.
Weaknesses / negative experiences
Some readers may feel the plot’s most shocking violence—while rooted in American realities of mass shootings—registers structurally as a hinge rather than an organic inevitability; others might want deeper counterspeech from Sadie in publicity scenes, where the novel often lets the gendered imbalance sit uncorrected (perhaps on purpose). These are tensions, not failures, but they’ll divide readers.
Impact
Personally, I kept underlining the passages that articulate the hidden curriculum of creative work: “You try again. You fail better,” a line that captures the novel’s romance with iteration more than with any couple.
Comparison with similar works
If you loved A Little Life for intimacy and scars, The Interestings for art-friends across time, or Project Hail Mary for technical competence-as-plot, Zevin’s book threads those impulses through the soul of a studio. Critics across Washington Post, NPR, and Harvard Review hail the book’s capacious humanism and its serious treatment of games as art.
6. Personal insight with contemporary educational relevance
I teach and mentor creators who oscillate between Sam’s reach and Sadie’s rigor; the book’s most practical lesson is that teams need both—and at least one Marx. The novel’s in-world sources and real-world reception also map neatly onto media studies syllabi: appropriation debates in design (see the Ichigo/Kotaku thread), the economics of indie pipelines (Blood, Sweat, and Pixels), and startup culture’s gender dynamics.
Moreover, public data around the book’s reception—NYT bestseller lists, Goodreads community praise, and Penguin’s global sales positioning—support using the novel as a cross-disciplinary case: literary fiction that also functions as a social history of 1990s–2000s gaming. (Goodreads and Penguin UK highlight its award traction and translations.)
Pedagogically, the “fail better” ethos is a humane antidote to grade-obsessed learning; in my seminars, we unpack that exchange after a project ships and invite students to write a one-page “patch notes” reflection, mirroring how Unfair Games iterates after each launch.
7. Quotable lines
- “Ichigo is swept out to sea, and that is where the game begins. With a limited vocabulary, their only tools that bucket and shovel, Ichigo must find their way home.”
- “There is no more intimate act than play, even sex.” (statement circulating through the novel’s interviews and commentary on games-as-art).
- “For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.”
- “You try again. You fail better.”
- “I won’t apologize for the game Sadie and I made…And what is the alternative to appropriation?”
- “What…is a video game’s subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?” (on Unfair’s founding).
- “We can’t leave Ichigo this way, Sadie…You can’t abandon our child in a shitty sequel.”
- “It is possible that, without Sam…Sadie might not have become the game designer she became.”
- “Game companies have gotten too big and impersonal…They’re like zombies, with their heads in their cubicles.” (Dov’s industry critique).
- “In the face of a random, violent universe,” even “seemingly frivolous work” is “worth doing.”
8. Reception
Industry reviewers framed the book as both accessible to non-gamers and incisive about game culture’s artistry and toxicity. NPR and Washington Post praised its immersion and emotional intelligence; Wired and The Guardian took the moment to argue that literature is finally speaking fluently about games.
These conversations likely contributed to its bestseller momentum, year-end list dominance, and (per Zevin’s site) a slot on the NYT “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.”
9. Conclusion
If you care about how things are made—how a sketch on a whiteboard (stolen with comic bravado) becomes a world millions inhabit; how friendships weather envy, press tours, pregnancy nausea, publisher ultimatums, and loss; how art makes us more precise about love—then Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow belongs near the top of your list. It’s not a romance; it’s rarer than that: a long, serious account of collaboration as a life.
Recommendation
- For fiction readers: you’ll get a sweeping, tender, smart epic about creative work.
- For gamers and devs: you’ll feel seen—in the best and worst ways.
- For educators and founders: you’ll find a teachable case in building, breaking, and building again.