Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

The current videogame landscape is in the midst of the perennial “they released a new Pokémon, cue reaction season.” The vibe is the same as always: a gentle conflict between how poor the technical performance is and how delightful the general game experience feels. TikTok is adding fuel to the fire with lots of accounts creating the same joke in circumstantial simultaneity—a hypothetical person asks if the game is worth playing, a litany of grievances are presented, and the final culmination is some form of the statement, “So yeah, it’s amazing, I can’t stop playing it. I love it.”

I have played Red, X, and Sword. Not great at picking Pokemon.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is like a new Pokémon game. Not quite to the hyperbolic extreme needed for a TikTok punchline—“It is terrible, I love it!”—but I had many quibbles with the text even while I enjoyed the general act of reading it. The little gremlin that lives in my head and quietly whispers in my ear, “Psst…your worth as a person depends on how many people know you have a lot of videogame knowledge,” feasted on the pages of this book like none other. I lack the strength of will to not spend portions of this review with my hands flailing in the air even as I go back and bundle most of my petty critiques about videogame history and structure—and one about persimmons—into a hidden post-credit scene (spoiler: you can find it at the bottom).

If years of playing games has taught me anything, it’s to make sure you use your consumable items in a JRPG. That little tidbit doesn’t really apply here, but it a good reminder. A more applicable lesson is that if the game itself is fun to play, it is easy to forgive the framerate for being terrible or the UI for being cluttered. TikTok Pokémon reviews confirm that this is a majority consensus—it’s okay to like flawed things. Taken at a grand scale, it doesn’t make a lot of cohesive sense to be overly nitpicky of the media object you’re opting to spend your leisure time with: There is so much more media available than any one person could ever consume, so find something else. I have a finite lifespan. I likely gave up the time to read another book to read Tomorrow. From an outside perspective, it is wild to embrace any sort of friction in your “fun” if you don’t have to. So while I will list my grievances with the way in which videogames intersect with Tomorrow’s narrative, remember they aren’t so bad that I wanted to drop the book. My review isn’t quite comedic exaggeration for the point of making the same simple joke on social media, “This is so bad. Of course I love it,” but it is certainly in that genre. Think more Andy Rooney and less Angry Videogame Nerd.

The set dressing and nostalgia-bait of the videogame tidbits sprinkled throughout Tomorrow do annoy me, though. A worse sin is that I simply do not see what bearing videogames—as concepts, as artifacts, as products, as hobbies—have on the plot.

High water mark for presentation of video game history

Do not mistake me, I am thrilled beyond belief that a book that is this popular and generally well done is tangentially related to videogames at all; any borrowed valor the hobby can get in the minds of the mainstream is a huge win in my book. I wouldn’t have read Tomorrow if it didn’t prominently advertise game designers as its main cast, so score one for marketing. And I don’t expect every author to be obsessively immersed in both 50 years of game history and contemporary game design–but, like, I talked about video games and the illusion of perfection in Drive Your Plows over the Bones of the Dead. Do you really think I’m not gonna go light up on Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow for wearing the skin of videogames to ill effect? I’m sure some editors or grammar-focused people are annoyed I always underline book titles instead of italicizing them, and I get it, but I’m not trying to use incorrect grammatical stylings to parallel my plot or strengthen the poignancy of my metaphors and imagery.

Video game history is real and game design elements are real, so when a book presents itself as “in the real world” and draws in facts that are slightly off or simply wrong, they take me out of the book. I imagine art historians did not always love The DaVinci Code. I still like Tomorrow, though. It kind of felt like watching Law & Order after taking the bar exam (see, I do understand why someone might elide reality for clarity! Nobody who takes the bar calls it “the bar exam,”—it’s typically truncated to just “the bar”—but for non-lawyers, I made it trompe-l'œil rather than real). All that bad legal procedure is shoved into an episode of L&O to grease the plot, and it jumps out at a fresh attorney—newly infected with baby lawyer syndrome—often turning them into an annoying scold:

“But if I hadn’t pushed you to make Ichigo, where would you even be? You’d be one of a hundred programmers at EA working on Madden Football, if you were lucky.”

Just like the “bar exam,” no one speaking about games would ever think to append “football” when talking about a Madden title. Dude. It’s just Madden. Madden didn’t loan his name to, like, a schmup. “You’d be a faceless coder, working on Madden.” Same impact. Did you know Law & Order uses establishing shots outside of a civil courthouse in Manhattan, not a criminal courthouse, because it’s prettier? No Jack McCoy in the building you see, ever. Sorry. These little annoying details are not for normies reading Tomorrow or watching L&O, and I doubt they lessen the enjoyment of the plot for either one. But once you know, it’s kind of hard to ignore. At least for me.

I was once evacuated from this courthouse for a fire alarm and while I and a hundred other attorneys were outside reviewing case files a tourist asked me if we were all L&O extras.

I’m going to keep running back to say that I liked the book because listing out all my annoyances and piling them into one essay will sound like I don’t; gotta feed that brain gremlin, though, and get my good boy points for knowing that Nintendo stopped being a Hanafuda company in the 1940s, so having someone “…regret [that] he had missed an early opportunity to invest in Nintendo in the 1970s” because “They were just a playing card company” sets of my “I really hope someone got fired for that blunder” alarm.

The plot is interesting, the writing is good, the characters are compelling, but the thesis that ties it to videogames is bad. Videogames are often on the page, but they’re not in focus. They’re after effects, set dressing. It is to both its credit and detriment that the videogame stuff is kind of irrelevant–none of the “errors” (and I say that in quotes, because this is fiction and you can pretend it is set in a world where Nintendo made Hanafuda until 1991 if you really want) do actual damage to the plot because the real-world history of videogames and the particulars of the videogame industry aren’t tied in any meaningful way to the core of the book.

And what is that meaningful core? Well, two people make a few videogames, but it is mostly their relationship to themselves and to the world: how they process trauma, how they process each other. As they age, so does the videogame industry, but what this really means is that the author lists off a few more games chronologically; the games they play and the games they make don’t structurally impact what is going on in the world in any real or metaphorical way. Tomorrow has this rhythm of reference-churning throughout, and the videogame layer is shallow cruft: “Hey, you played Metal Gear Solid? So did I!” I respect that it is probably a challenge to make a mass market bestseller that does more than just say, “Remember Lara Croft?,” but as a videogame-pilled certified nerdo, I’d rather interior references to games and game structure rather than just the squirt of serotonin released from recognizing their titles.

Sam & Sadie are almost exclusively PC devs; i kept imaging Ichigo controlled like MegaMan for DOS.

The duo of designers that form the core of the book design or produce a bunch of games as we while away the years, and most of them are GameDevStory titles–they shadow some popular franchise structure (dude, super huge ups to the author for plunking a Persona shoutout into a book millions of people will read) but they’re not, like, fresh game concepts or plot relevant. Zelda, MapleStory, Half-Life, BioShock: all the games you’ve probably heard of are there with their serial numbers filed off. There’s nothing to the games within the book–no design, no structure, no modern “in-joke” references. The two game developers, Sam and Sadie, could have been musicians working on an album, or visual artists painting the next Guernica (when Guernica was referenced, it did some actual heavy imagery lifting, which did not happen when alluding to Zelda or Mario games), or, heck, even a duo of authors writing a novel together. There’s nothing beyond a few bon mots about playing together being more intimate than sex and an overuse of the word “ludic” that makes this a book about video games:

“What is a game…[i]t’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

The author mentions in the notes at the end that Sadie’s sex pest professor probably wasn’t getting a pre-release disc of MGS, or that Rosella’s Quest wasn’t actually out yet when Sadie talks about playing it. That’s, like, nit-picky date-scold stuff that I think is stupid to worry about. What makes it different from arbitrarily dropping in the Nintendo/hanafuda connection—and getting it wrong—is that mentioning hanafuda history has no bearing at all on the plot or the world of the novel: those two games are the closest that any videogames mentioned in the book come to complimenting any themes in the plot. It is important and does mean something that in the late 1980s King’s Quest IV had Rosella, a girl, as the main character—one of the first female-led games in a major series—and it was relevant to the scene and relationship between Sadie and her game design professor that Kojima’s sexist creep nature infests not just the Metal Gear franchise but video games writ large. It’s clearly an important aspect of videogame history and culture that Rosella had agency rather than being a damsel/prize; using themes like this as allusions can make videogame references mean more than just aesthetic setup or nostalgic throwback. But we don’t really get that—unless I missed it, I simply don’t know why most of these games that are cited. [edit from aug 2023—just learned that the concept for ingénue-Sadie’s breakout student game is lifted from Train.] They could be replaced with 80s or 90s music, though the one time music vaguely of the era does appear it hurt me. While negging that sex pest professor, someone calls him, “The poor man’s Chris Cornell,” Marx whispered, referencing the lead singer of the grunge band Soundgarden.

C’mon. If you don’t know Chris Cornell by name, you aren’t going to go, “Chris who? Oh, HELL yeah, Soundgarden, I know them though!” And when we later get media theorist Marshall McLuhan quoted, his name is just dropped in like, duh, you know Marshall McLuhan, no explanation needed. I cannot get over how bad it felt to get an explanation of who Chris Cornell was by tautologically referencing Soundgarden, but then have McLuhan just dangling out there.

So basically, I think this is a book about two videogame designers that uses videogames as pretty scenery rather than as structural plot support. But I like videogames, so I like that the flavor is there. I would just never call this a book about videogames; its a book about relationships, and that the people in those relationships happen to make videogames doesn’t have much to do with what is happening on the page. The character work is good, though: people act like people do—multifaceted and sometimes non-optimally—without feeling like their actions or reactions are arbitrary. The core tie between Sadie and Sam is interesting to read about, and the way all the other characters intersect across that bond creates some memorable moments.

I do like a lot of what goes on in Tomorrow, and it has a few absolutely brilliant scenes. My favorite had nothing whatsoever to do with videogames. Sam’s mom, an actor who found some level of professional stability when Sam was a kid, was on some billboards:

She became the spokeswoman for a Korean beer called JjokJjok, and her face was on a fifty-foot-wide billboard in Wilshire, with the slogan “What’s the most beautiful woman in Koreatown drinking?”

When we first see this ad, though, it’s not as a fresh new billboard blazing across the LA skyline but as a faded old poster in Sam’s grandparents’ restaurant: at the time, it seemed like a detail meant to show that the pizzeria was a little dingy, a little run-down–more of that Donkey Kong cocktail cabinet retro aesthetic. But hundreds of pages later, we learn it was that advert—the billboard—featuring Sam’s mom. Of course that faded old poster is still up, it is their dead daughter. I think being able to Chehkov’s Gun me with the poster takes amazing skill, and one of the main reasons–beyond the sneaky ability to make me super fucking sad when really bad things happen (which seems like an easy trick in fiction but is in fact shockingly hard)—that I know this author is a good one. A few moments like this is all it takes to get me to recommend something, finite life and all, and I’ll still be thinking about that poster sneaking its way into an early scene long after I stop being annoyed at Tomorrow for asking me if I want to “…raft across the river, or do you wait for the river conditions to improve” in Oregon Trail.

There are shibboleths in videogaming, key words that you should know. “FORD THE RIVER” is entry-level 90s kid memelord slang, as is “CAULK THE WAGON.” It’s the “Knights who say Ni” of Oregon Trail. How does one use the word…“raft”…when discussing your covered wagon travel options? It’s jarring…

Ok, I’ve basically covered everything I wanted with Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. It’s pretty good! I like having videogames appear in a popular book. The author is skilled and the writing is smooth. You can go now.

You’re still around? Well I guess we can feed the annoying nitpick gremlin together, then. One more thing. Two more things. Three more things.

If you saw the transition screens and recognized their provenance—or at least their similarity—they’re what I think Tomorrow could have been; purposeful and subtle. Turning Red takes Sailor Moon, makes some backgrounds so you wink-wink-nudge-nudge acknowledge the homage, but also uses the theming of “girls and puberty, but with over-the-top transformation metaphors” so its unmistakable without being identical. Tomorrow doesn’t do that. What is does is a bunch of annoying things, and now that we’re in the post-credit scene of my essay, you must be here to hear the grievances too petty for the core of this review:

First, when Sadie is leaving the East Coast for the West, that sex pest prof makes the classic “L.A. is a trash town” pitch for her to stay:

Did she know the drugstores closed at ten? What would happen if she needed cough syrup or batteries or legal pads after ten? Did she know there weren’t any all-night diners or bodegas or takeout? Where would she eat? Where would she get decent bagels or pizza?

And, I’m sorry, maybe there was a prior draft of the book where she lived in NYC and went to Tisch or something, but I’m pretty sure she lives in Cambridge; as in, she’s leaving the greater Boston metro area. What is she going to miss, Pizzeria Regina? barf emoji. This is basically asking GPT-3 to write a list for “cons of moving to LA from NYC”.

Ok, ok, probably the pettiest thing that I have to excise from my mind is about fruit. I also left NYC for California, and fresh produce is one of the best things about the area. Persimmons have become my absolute favorite fruit—I had a total of one persimmon ever in my life before, and it was the baking kind because I didn’t know the difference—and now every persimmon season my in-laws bring me nearly sixty out of the hundreds they pick to help out their neighbors. I eat one a day basically until the year ends.

“Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit.” Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. “Can you believe our luck?” Marx said. “We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit.”

It’s a cute moment, with Sadie trying to decipher whether Marx always loved persimmons or loves persimmons now because there they are, available; she isn’t built to realize that it doesn’t matter why you love something. Great scene. However, as I said, I’ve eaten hundreds of fresh-off-the-tree persimmons since moving to California, and not once has juice run down my chin. Maybe I’m just unlucky, but reading it made feel like someone just said they loved to bite into a banana and feel the juice run down their chin. Cannot.

And now we’ll close out with some dumb videogame stuff:

The last box Sadie unpacked contained her collection of PC games, which she always kept on hand for reference. She arranged the games, which were in a combination of jewel cases and book-like cardboard containers, on the shelf: Commander Keen, Myst, Doom, Diablo, Final Fantasy, Metal Gear Solid, Leisure Suit Larry, The Colonel’s Bequest, Ultima, Warcraft, Monkey Island, The Oregon Trail, and three dozen others.

Sadie is primarily a PC dev. And no way is there a PC versions of Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid, definitely not when big boxes or even jewel cases were de rigueur. I still vaguely remember the “Square just shot themselves in the foot” message board reaction when FF13 was announced as available on more than just the PlayStation (seriously, spellcheck just raged that I didn’t camelcase the “station” in playstation, get over yourself) ecosystem. I was still mourning the loss of the N64 Final Fantasy so I vaguely understand the impulse for brand loyalty, but that doesn’t change the fact that there simply wasn’t a Final Fantasy on PC outside of emulation until like 2008. And if MegaMan for DOS is any indication—which is sort of how I imaged Ichigo controlled—we’re better off that they stayed console exclusive for a long time.

Also, just naming the franchises is lame. Which Final Fantasy? Which Warcraft? Which Leisure Suit Larry? Which…you get the idea. I mean, Sadie does tell her sexual predator collegiate advisor she’s playing Chrono Trigger, so I guess she had access to an SNES and the Fantasies Final, but this list is pretty weak for a game dev. Sorry for being judgey, Sadie, you can like what you like, you’re still a real gamer. But also, programming wünderkin or not, you’re probably not playing Chrono Trigger on an emulator in the mid-nineties because they not really good enough to do the transparency effects that are needed to see your little guys run around on certain map screens. And at one point you need to press multiple buttons at once to trigger a door (in the Arris Dome, I think?), and I know I could never get those inputs to work correctly, effectively ending my game. (I had loaned my cartridge of CT where almost all my stats were the little star icon to a friend with whom I had lost touch during the onset of teenagehood, so I did not feel bad about trying to play it on my PC).

All right, my friend, you’ve made it through the bowels of my shallow irritants. I remind you again that I did like the book—if I didn’t, I wouldn’t notice or remember these little weirdo complaints so much. Go have fun and read a fiction best seller that at least acknowledges videogames exist in the world, and don’t forget: “gaming” is a legal term of art that has historically applied exclusively to the gambling industry!