Chris Skaggs, a web developer from
Newberg, Oregon, stated that he was inspired to found Soma Games after registering to attend the
Christian Game Developers Conference in 2005 despite no knowledge of the
Christian video game industry sector. Shortly after his registration, the conference coordinator asked prospective attendees if anyone wanted to appear in a televised interview in
Boston, which Skaggs accepted. These ideas were put on hiatus for a time due to external circumstances in Skaggs' life, but in 2008 Skaggs and his colleagues began brainstorming ideas again. In October 2008, John Bergquist began volunteering more actively, helping Skaggs write down ideas and establish Soma as an actual company (though due to financial constraints he was not hired as an official employee until 2011), and Rande Bruhn followed as an official business partner two months later. In December 2008, Soma Games received funding for the first time and began coding its first projects.
Arc series As of the beginning of 2009, Soma consisted of four employees (with three additional remote "contractors"). For the first few years following the creation of the company, the members of Soma Games focused on fleshing out their three-game concepts as well as acquiring publicity and funding. During this time, the Soma Games members developed a fourth game concept for a full series called "
Arc." The team members decided that the
Arc series would consist of three small
iPhone games or "episodes" which would act as a prologue for a larger console game also titled
Arc. 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. The first game in the Arc series,
G: Into the Rain, was announced on February 11, 2009. It eventually released on April 25, 2009. The app received a variety of 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. On June 17, 2009, Soma revealed plans for the sequel to
G, titled
F: The Storm Riders, in an interview with the German app review site press HOME. 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." 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. Eventually it was also revealed that the third mobile game preceding the series' finale of
Arc would be titled "
E, referring to the main gameplay concept of "Energy"." In 2009, the staff of Soma Games were asked to speak at the
Christian Game Developers Conference in
Portland, Oregon and have been included as recurring speakers nearly every year since. In 2009,
G won the "Best iPhone Game" award at the conference.
Relationship with Intel In December 2009, Soma partnered with
Intel Corporation as one of the initial developers for their upcoming
AppUp app store. A
Flash port of
G was one of the 22 initial games on the AppUp platform. 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. 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.
G was ported to the
BlackBerry PlayBook in April 2011 to be among the device's launch catalog, A
Steam port for the game was also considered but ultimately cancelled. In order to develop the PC port for
G, the 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." 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. 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."
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 app stores. The game received generally positive reviews, with some sources commenting favorably upon its originality and robot customization features but critiquing its tutorial and imprecise touch control movement. 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.
Wind Up Football was added as a game mode in an update to the original
Wind Up Robots game at first, but was later released to app stores as a standalone game. Soma Games helped host the 2011
Christian Video Game Developers Conference in their hometown of
Newberg, Oregon.
Redwall series In 2011, Chris Skaggs and Soma Games entered into talks regarding the development of a video game based on the
Redwall series of books. That same year, the company started a
Kickstarter which raised nearly $18,000 to develop the game, and announced it would be entitled "Redwall: The Warrior Reborn
". On August 9, Soma released a
Minecraft map named
Abbeycraft as a "precursor release" to the full adventure game using funds from the Kickstarter. and in September, 2018 the game was released on
Steam for
Mac and
PC under the name
The Lost Legends of Redwall: The Scout. Two sequels to the game,
The Scout Act 2 and
The Scout Act 3 were released on April 30th, 2021 and December 25th, 2021, respectively. A narrative
Redwall mobile app was also released in November 2021. == Company culture ==