CINCINNATI (WXIX) – After a lot of hard work and time, a Tri-State is celebrating the launch of a video game he and his company created.
Between being a part-owner of Highball Cincy, living down the street, and running a startup, Chris Bergman says he is pretty much always in Over-the-Rhine.
Perhaps you have walked right by him and did not know he was working very hard on the App Chores Monster a few years ago.
You might also not know he has launched a video game, Ra-Ra Boom, which is playable in 240 countries.
“Ra-Ra Boom, what is that? It’s cheerleaders blowing stuff up, obviously,” Bergman explained.
The game is also a beat-em-up arcade-style video game.
Bergman says it started with just the words “Ra-Ra Boom.”
“It really started with the name first before anything else,” Bergman recalls.
He says he bought the domain name for a website called raraboom.com because he thought of the phrase and just liked it.
From a young age, Bergman had an interest in video games.
“I grew up playing video games, always a huge nerd,” Bergman said of himself. “I liked Saturday morning cartoons, and I wanted to make a game that looked like a Saturday morning cartoon as well.”
In 2019, he founded Gylee Games, and the full picture of Ra-Ra Boom started to take shape.
As game director, he’s not necessarily writing code to make all of this work; he’s more like a film director, overseeing his vision of what players see before them.
“We had 86 people who worked on this game,” Bregman said. “From writers to concept artists, environmental artists, voice actors.”
Getting a game published is not so easy, Bergman explains.
He says many games, even the ones with a $100 million budget, get canceled.
That was not the case for Ra-Ra Boom.
The game launched last week in 240 countries, in 13 languages, on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.
Ra-Ra Boom is playable on an arcade machine in Highball Cincy on Race Street in OTR.
“That feeling is just a feeling of pride and really that we did it, really proud of our team and proud that we were able to do it,” Bergman said.
Ra-Ra Boom won’t be the last game from Bergman and his company.
He says they are already working on two more games.
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