I worry for you. If you love everyone, you'll end up having hurt feelings most of the time. I suppose, relative to the length of your life, you feel … - Gabrielle Zevin

He was skilled — — at the end of the level, he could make Mario land at the top of the flagpole, something Sadie had never mastered. Although Sadie liked to be the player, there was a pleasure to watching someone who was a dexterous player — -it was like watching a dance. He never looked over at her. He cleared the first boss battle, and the words BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE appeared on the screen.

Sam would later tell people that these mazes were his first attempts at writing games. "A maze," he would say, "is a video game distilled to its purest form." Maybe so, but this was revisionist and self-aggrandizing. The mazes were for Sadie. To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.

There is no purity in art. The process of how you arrive at something doesn't matter at all.