Today we’d like to introduce you to Matthew Viglione.
Matthew, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We started SomaSim in San Francisco in 2013 to make simulation games. We had moved from Chicago to San Francisco in 2005 after my co-founder, Robert Zubek, finished grad school at Northwestern and got a job making games in the Bay Area. He worked for various game studios in California and I worked as Communications Director for a large SF non-profit. After a few years, we caught the itch to start making our own games, so we began planning how we would found our own indie studio. With some planning behind us, we were finally able to make the studio a reality in 2013. Our first game, 1849, came out in May of 2014. It’s a city builder set in the California Gold Rush. As we were preparing to release 1849, we were also getting ready to end our time in California and move home to Chicago. We always wanted to come home and now we were able to do that. After we got back to Chicago, we started work on our second game, Project Highrise – a skyscraper simulation where players design, build and manage high rise buildings. We didn’t plan it, but there was a sort of poetry in coming back to the city that created skyscrapers to build our own game about them. In developing the game, Chicago became a big part of Project Highrise. A lot of our visual design – especially for our user interfaces – was directly inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago work. We released Project Highrise for desktop PCs in September of 2014. There have been several expansions and content additions since then. We released a mobile veresion on iPads and Android tablets in April of this year and we’re getting ready to bring the game to XBox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch this fall. After that, it will be time to go full speed on our next, unannounced game. We can’t really say much about it at this point, but what we can say is that Chicago will feature very prominently.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
We’ve been incredibly fortunate that we can answer that question with a yes. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s been an easy road – smooth roads can have big hills to climb. One thing that’s been a big challenge for us is finding our players. We’re pretty OK at making games. We have the art, tech and design skills to do that. But there are a lot of games out there and more come out every day. The actual numbers are frankly terrifying sometimes. For us, we’ve be challenged to find “our players” – to cut through all of the noise and get in front of the people who would really enjoy what we’re making. For our first game, it proved too difficult for us to do on our own. We’ve been lucky to find a great publisher, Kasedo Games, to help us overcome those distribution and marketing hurdles. But even with some great help, that’s still quite difficult.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the SomaSim story. Tell us more about the business.
We make simulation video games. We focus on finding a compelling complex set of systems – like a skyscraper or a California Gold Rush city – and then create a game where players can experience what it’s like to be an architect or to be in charge of a frontier settlement.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
An immense amount, I think. But luck is kind of a hard thing to define. We’ve been very lucky to be able to find and work with some of the people who have made our games possible. Our amazing artist (and Columbia College grad) Gediminas Einikis, was randomly referred to one day by a friend on Twitter, so we added him to our list of potential collaborators and then when the time came to make our first game, we started working together and now we couldn’t do what we do now without him. The same is true for a lot of our collaborators – just the coincidence of being connected to some amazing talent. In another sense, it’s a bit of luck that in the years while we were planning and developing Project Highrise, no one else released a skyscraper simulation game like ours. It had been a couple of decades since a tower simulation game was out there, so there was a lot of pent-up demand. If another studio or company had released before us, it’s uncertain if the game would have done as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.somasim.com
- Email: support@somasim.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/somasimgames/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/somasim_games
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