Soma Games

Soma Games is an American third-party video game developer based in Newberg, Oregon. Founded in 2005 by Chris Skaggs, John Bergquist, and Rande Bruhn. Soma originally produced games mobile games based on their own original properties such as G and Windup Robots, but in 2018 became the first studio to create a licensed game based on the popular Redwall series of books. Soma Games emphasizes its Christian company culture, and often describes itself as a Christian video game company that does not make video games specifically about Christianity.[1]

History

Christopher Skaggs was living in Newberg, Oregon in 2005 working in the web development industry. At some point during this work, he read an article informing him about the Christian Game Developers Conference, and decided on a whim to attend because it was close to where he lived. Despite knowing very little about the video game industry, Chris responded to a request from the conference organizers before the conference started asking for one attendee to be interviewed on a late-night television show in Boston, Massachusetts. Through a series of chance conversations with a great number of speakers at the conference over the next few days, Chris learned a significant amount of information about the "Christian video game" sector of the video game industry and was interviewed on the show Nitebeat a few days later.[2] This crash-course in video game development inspired in Chris a desire to start his own video game company, and over the four days of the conference he began devising the name, marketing materials, business plans, and a website for Soma Games.[3]

In this same year, Chris was working on the website for a Christian retreat event called Bootcamp NW, and at this event he met two of his future partners, John Bergquist and Rande Bruhn. John began helping Chris write down ideas for Soma Games and establish Soma as an actual company. However, there was not enough money to actually pay John, so he provided assistance voluntarily while continuing his job as a fish biologist.[4] Chris also began being mentored by Rande Bruhn during this time and developed the plots for three concept games, GRoG, Dark Glass, and The Race.[5] These ideas were put on hiatus for a while due to external circumstances in Chris' life, but in 2008 Chris and his colleagues began brainstorming ideas again.[6] In October 2008 John Bergquist began volunteering for Soma (though he was not hired as an official employee until 2011), and Rande Bruhn followed as a business partner two months later.[7][8] In December 2008, Soma Games received its first bit of funding wrote its first line of code.[8][9]

Arc series

Going into 2009, Soma consisted of four employees (with three additional remote "contractors" giving their time both paid and unpaid.)[10] Throughout its earliest years, Soma Games focused on fleshing out their three-game concepts as well as gaining publicity and funding.[11][12] They soon developed a fourth game concept, this being for a full series they decided to call "Arc." The team decided that the Arc series would consist of three small iPhone games or "episodes" that would act as a prologue for a larger console game eponymously titled Arc.[13] As a way to obtain early funding from fans, Soma released a computer wallpaper featuring concept art from their Dark Glass game that players could buy with the promise that they could later "redeem" this wallpaper for a free copy of Arc when it was released.[13] In March 2009, the company began selling merchandise through CafePress.com.[14]

The first game in the Arc series, G, was announced on February 11, 2009.[15] It entered beta in March and was submitted to the Apple App Store in April, eventually releasing on April 25, 2009.[16][17] The app received very positive reviews upon launch, with reviewers praising its visuals, storyline, art, and voice-acting but also criticizing some technical bugs present in the initial build and the game's tendency to become boring quickly.[18][19][20][21][22][23] Software updates were continued to be put out for G throughout the rest of the year.

On June 17, 2009, Soma revealed plans for the sequel to G, titled F, in an interview with the German app review site pressHOME. In the same way that the name "G" stood for its main gameplay mechanic of "Gravity," "F" was said to refer to the sequel's main gameplay mechanic of "Force."[24] Screenshots were released to news outlets a couple of months later and the title was revealed to be a 3D game rather than following the 2D approach of its predecessor.[25] Eventually it was also revealed that the third mobile game preceding the series' finale of Arc would be titled "E.[23][26]

In 2009, the staff of Soma Games were asked to speak at the Christian Game Developers Conference in Portland, Oregon and have been asked to be recurring speakers nearly every year since.[27] In 2009, G won the "Best iPhone Game" award at the conference.[28] In October 2009 Soma partnered with the band Skillet to give away free IPod Touches with copies of G on them.[29]

Relationship with Intel

In December 2009, Soma began partnering with Intel Corporation to be one of the initial developers for their upcoming AppUp app store.[30] A Flash port of G was developed by the team in approximately two and a half weeks, and launched as one of 22 initial games on the AppUp platform.[31][32][33] In a series of blog posts, Chris Skaggs conveyed his excitement to be one of the original app developers on an app store that would be pre-installed on certain computers.[34][35] With the release of their 2.0 update for G in March 2010, Soma ran a contest for players to win a then-unreleased IPad by reaching the highest score in G.[36][37] G was ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook in April 2011 to be among the device's launch catalog,[38] and a Steam port for the game was also considered but ultimately cancelled.[39]

In order to develop the PC port for G, development of F was put on hold, but was picked up again the next year. Gameplay footage of F was released in October 2010 featuring a 3D space environment running on the Unity engine, and the game was given the subtitle "The Storm Riders."[40] Actress and video game journalist Lisa Foiles was also announced to be working on the game's story as a writer, and Lisa was cited as responsible for adding cutscenes to the game's script.[41][42] However, despite releasing many pieces of concept art, teasers, and gameplay footage, the release date for F: The Storm Riders was continually pushed back, and the release for the game (as well as its two sequels) was eventually put on an indefinite hiatus.

Wind Up Robots and continuing Arc

At the same time as development on F was taking place, Soma Games was also reportedly working on another of their initial game ideas, GRoG, which stood for "that Giant Robot Game you have." During development, work on the game evolved into working on a prequel, and on May 31, 2011 this prequel was announced to be released later in the year under the title "Wind Up Robots."[43] Wind Up Robots missed its July launched date and eventually was released on December 14, 2011 for the Intel AppUp, iOS and Amazon Kindle Fire appstores.[44][45][46] The game received generally positive from all sources.[47][48][49][50][51] In 2012 Soma participated in the Intel Ultimate Coder: Ultrabook Challenge to use the same assets from Wind Up Robots to make a spinoff game called Wind Up Football in six weeks.[52] Wind Up Football was added as a gamemode in an update to the original Wind Up Robots game at first, but was later released to appstores as a standalone game.

Going into 2012, during one of their weekly update YouTube videos, Soma announced that they planned to continue the Arc and GRoG storylines that they had developed.[53] In order to remind players of the Arc storyline, Soma announced that they were remaking the original G: Into the Rain for X and X as G Prime.[54]

Redwall series

In 2011, an associate had called Soma's founder Chris Skaggs to inform him that he had acquired the master license to the Redwall series from the author of the books, Brian Jacques (this was a milestone, as Jacques had been notoriously guarded about sharing the license with anyone). Chris and his associate entered into talks of developing a small mobile game for the Redwall brand, as mobile gaming was where the Soma team had the most experience.[4] In 2013, a Kickstarter was set up to fund the Redwall game, and in 2018 the game was released on Steam for Mac and PC.

Company culture

The management and staff of Soma Games are vocal Christians, and are very open about their religious affiliation. However, while the company is based on Christian values, they have often clearly expressed that they do not create "Christian video games," that is, video games that are explicitly based around Christian stories and content. Soma Games have often described themselves as being the "C. S. Lewis of video games," taking inspiration from the prolific Christian author by making video games with Christian values and themes, but that are not specifically using Christian stories and tropes.[4][6][23][55][56] In its early days, Soma had to overcome the obstacle of funding its games to try and deliver polished content rather than manufacturing its earliest products on a minimal budget — a challenge they cited as a point of failure for many startup Christian video game developers.[6][57][58]

The company founder, Chris Skaggs, has mentioned many times that he values artistic beauty and a good story in games over impressive new gameplay.[4][5][23][59][60] He has also many times mentioned his company's emphasis on commanding rest, contrary to the typical expectation of video game companies to implement "crunch time."[4][61]

Code-Monkeys

Soma Games also ran a sister brand called "Code-Monkeys" in which their same employees would do "work-for-hire" developing games and software not of original IP's. This was done to provide income in-between the release of their larger projects published under Soma Games.[62]

In June 2011, the Soma Games developers released the game Bok Choy Boy for the Intel AppUp platform and iOS under the name of their sister brand, Code-Monkeys. This game was based around the popular Chinese Bok Choy Boy toy line.[63]

Games published

As Soma Games
Title Release date Notes
G: Into the Rain April 25, 2009 (iPhone)

January 7, 2010 (AppUp)

April 14, 2011 (BlackBerry PlayBook)

 The first game in the Arc series.
Windup Robots December 14, 2011 (Android, iOS, AppUp) A prequel to the planned game GRoG.
Windup Football 2012 (Mac, PC, iOS, Android) A spin-off of Windup Robots made for the Intel Ultimate Coder: Ultrabook Challenge.
The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout September 14, 2018 (Mac, PC)
The Lost Legends of Redwall: Escape the Gloomer November 16, 2018 (Mac, PC)

May 9, 2019 (Android, iOS, Alexa)

 Developed in partnership with Clopas.

As Code-Monkeys

Title Release date Notes
Lunar Storm November 2010 (AppUp) A retro-game tribute.
Bok Choy Boy June 2011 Developed for Chinese markets.
'Santa's Giftship December 2011 An homage to the game Zombie Gunship by Limbic Software.

References
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