THE SOMA STORY

— CHAPTER 2 —

…in which our hero takes an apparent detour

Coming back from Boston I was understandably excited. So much had happened in such a short time and it seemed undeniable that God was driving this idea forward. I couldn’t wait to start making a video game!

Zorro and the Training Wheel

There is this great scene in the Mask of Zorro where the old Zorro stops a drunk young Antonio Banderas from rushing off to pick a fight with the bad guy. After beating him up…in order to protect him from himself…Zorro tells the enthusiastic young man, “You would have fought bravely and died quickly.”

Joseph Campbell and others have written at length about the uncanny way in which we see roughly the same myths being told all around the world and one of the most common is what’s come to be known as The Hero’s Journey*. In one formulation of the story the Hero is first offered an invitation up into a world that is bigger than the one he understood before and that certainly was an apt description of my trip to Boston. After the invitation the Hero enters a period of training that seems to immediately take him away from the invitation he just accepted – and that too feels like a very apt description of the next three years for Soma Games.

Returning to Zorro, the Fox brings Antonio Banderas back to his hideout and introduces him to the Training Wheel – a mechanism to focus the young warrior and prepare him for what he’ll be facing. It is a process of learning, discipline, and often UN-learning bad habits from before.

It was during this time that we started to generate some initial concept art and to flesh out some of the story lines for GRoG, The Race, and Dark Glass. But in hindsight, this period seems as though the real training was in things that were either less interesting (to me at the time anyway) or much deeper. I had a TON to learn about things like business plans, marketing efforts and good business sense. We did learn a few cool technical things (like an unforgettable field trip to Valve) but at the time we really imagined this as being a console game effort and we saw quickly how expensive that kind of thing was. Not that we saw that as an insurmountable barrier, but it wasn’t something we were going to bootstrap either.

More important than the techniques of doing business were the lessons on how NOT to do business. In prayer we heard over and over again that God was looking for people “who could not be bought.” It seems like such a particular phrase but it was something that came to us over and over and over again and we were regularly being exercised on the matter that Heaven was our provider, not the world. You know, it’s funny- when you’re starting out and broke that lesson seems easy and obvious. But as I write this and Soma Games is enjoying a modicum of success and attention I see how easy it is to lose that reality in your heart even while paying lip service to the concept to your friends. Through all of that I discovered a strange double-mindedness in my thoughts that I hope to be finally be rid of.

When things were going well it was easy to ‘give God the glory’ at the same time I was quite aware of how much hard work I’d done. When things were tight I’d feel like God was holding out on me or I was somehow screwing up. I think I’ve come to feel like I can’t have it both ways. If Soma really is God’s thing then he has to get the glory if it sails and, in the most respectful way, the blame if it doesn’t. I’m not suggesting that I don’t have a role to play here but if I am doing my best to walk with the spirit and baring some significant moral failure, then as Brother Lawrence says – I’m only as good a vessel as He has selected and perfected. Now I don’t know if that’s at all theologically correct but it sure seems like the only way off the crippling dilemma of perusing what seems to be a vision.

When the Student is Ready…

One of the other aspects of the Hero’s Journey is the timely appearance of a mentor or teacher. Luke meets Obi Wan, Arthur meets Merlin, I met Rande. About a month before the whole Boston drama unfolded I’d attended a men’s retreat with a group called Boot Camp Northwest and I was totally freaking rocked. A lot happened at that camp, most of it was excruciatingly personal, and it’s too big a story to relate here but suffice it to say that the experience was what opened my mind to some critical concepts and paved the way for the trip to Boston. It was also there that I first met Rande Bruhn, the man who is now Soma’s CEO and probably my closest friend.

At that time he was a guy on stage and while his sessions were powerful I didn’t know the man; that would come about two years later. I did attend two or three other BCNW events and started to strike up acquaintances with the eight or so men behind it. I wound up volunteering to help with their website and eventually built deep friendships with this group of remarkable men and around Christmas 2008 Rande and I became business partners and Soma Games wrote its first line of code.

Before I shoot off to that part of the story I need to dwell just a bit here because this season of the story might seem more like a detour than anything else.

First, the fellowship I joined with these dozen warriors is a source of tremendous strength, wisdom and healing for all of us. Life in this world is a battle. Starting a business is a battle. Starting a business with the express intent of infiltrating a powerful industry that doesn’t want you… now that’s a battle. I know myself well enough to say that I would have jumped forward with Soma Games, throwing wisdom to the dogs, were it not for this band of brothers I met around 2006. I would have fought bravely and died quickly. I see so many men, in and out of the church, who soldier through their lives almost entirely alone with no real friends to fight alongside them – and they perish in the effort. If I can impart two things to anybody interested in walking this path, let this be the second thing you commit to: find and commit to a group of deep friends that you are honest with, loyal to, and different from.

Let the first thing be this: find and submit to a mentor. It’s hard for me to explain how important Rande has been to this process and he’ll be irritated (and silently pleased) that I wrote this because he likes to take a back seat role, leaving the public side of this enterprise to me but the reality is that Soma Games would still be nothing but a stack of notes were it not for this man’s willingness to take me under his wing to share his life and wisdom.

I suppose in some ways Rande has been a father-figure though he’s not that much older than me. In other ways he’s been a coach, he’s certainly been a teacher. But most of all he’s been a superb friend. It seems perhaps the best description is an older brother. He’s shared his life, his home, his family, his time and treasure and truly I don’t know where any of us would be without him at this point – probably skipping across the bottom, wondering why things didn’t work out but hoping things would change.

Wisdom without revelation is dry religion, but revelation without wisdom is a three year-old with a shotgun.

Knowing how much Rande has given to me – my hope now is that we’ll be able to honor him and give something back. I joke with Ann that Rande may have taught me about money but I’m teaching Rande about funny – I guess it’s a start.

In part three of this story Soma actually builds a game! {gasp!} …

Chapter 3

* The Hero’s Journey: Many of the people writing on this topic of universal myths come to the conclusion that these stories must all draw from a Jungian subconscious or reflect some kind of evolutionary leftover – or to say it another way that they are all equally “false” as there is no way they could be based on any kind of shared, real experience. But there is another explanation for this phenomenon if you’re willing to get past the limits of a materialist worldview. What if all these universal stories exist because they are all drawing from the one True Story – Christ’s story? The Word says that eternity has been placed in our hearts and that creation itself speaks of God’s character. Is it such a stretch to think that wise men and women throughout history have discerned aspects of Christ’s story, even apart from Scripture, and woven them into the tales they use to explain a world they find otherwise inscrutable? If pre-scriptural people like Job, Melchizedek, and Jethro knew God and got it right – the idea that others got it less-right seems reasonable to me.