The chapter opens with the imagined first cutscene of Ichigo: a genderless small child, limited in language and tools, swept out to sea and tasked with finding home. This vision follows weeks of fruitless brainstorming. Sam steals a whiteboard and markers, yet ideas feel trivial to Sadie, whose critical training outpaces her confidence. Sam articulates his motive—to make something that makes people happy—grounded in how games once let him escape pain.

They attend Marx’s Twelfth Night. The production’s elaborately staged shipwreck prompts Sadie and Sam to whisper the core premise: a very young, gender-neutral child lost at sea, whose ambiguity lets any player identify with them. This follows context about Marx’s theater experience and the racism that channels him into limited roles, shaping his decision to study economics despite loving productions.

After the show, dinner with Marx’s father, Ryu Watanabe, exposes that Marx is informally producing their game—news that stings Sadie. Ryu recounts childhood fears of summer storms on Japan’s west coast and warmly affirms their “child washed to sea” concept as classic, which further commits Sam and Sadie to the idea.

While packing to move into Marx’s room, Sadie fixates on Hokusai’s The Great Wave, and she and Sam adopt a stylized, resource-friendly look inspired by Japanese art and anime. A later interview excerpt shows “Mazer” refusing to apologize for cultural borrowing, arguing against rigid cultural silos and invoking his mixed-race identity, even as he acknowledges he would make a different game now.

A flashback to 1984 traces Sam’s arrival in Los Angeles with his mother, Anna. In Koreatown, he discovers community and identity fluidity; in his grandparents’ pizzeria, the Donkey Kong cabinet becomes a sanctuary that orders a chaotic world haunted by a New York suicide he witnessed. On his tenth birthday, a conversation with Anna frames games as moments that can only be known when played. Sam meets his biological father, agent George Masur, for a stilted lunch and a Malibu invitation. Picked up by his grandmother Bong Cha, Sam receives blunt disdain for George and an affirming lie about being “one-hundred-percent” good Korean boy—underscoring his mixed, uneasy belonging and the comfort he seeks in games.