The SRRN Team

Aujang Abadi (CEO) -- Aujang's brilliance is only surpassed by his narcissism. He is consumed by two universal truths: that games can be accepted as the next medium of art, and that he is the only person capable of seeing this vision to fruition. (It's hard to be him. The fact that he is Iranian really only exacerbates the situation.) He wants to hug a bear before he dies, a dream with the unique characteristic of actually being dumber than it sounds. His favorite game is Final Fantasy IV, which he insists is the greatest Final Fantasy ever made... mostly because he's an idiot. (He wants to hug a bear.)

Tyler Carbone (COO) -- Tyler is just as arrogant as Aujang, but not nearly as smart. (Can you tell who's writing these bios?) But, he did go to Harvard, so he has a fancy certificate that technically asserts otherwise. His passion for gaming manifests itself in pragmatic ways, which helps to curtail Aujang's grandiose (and often nonsensical) ideas. He also loves loud, fast cars, which fits with the Harvard thing, in a compensating sort of way. Tyler's favorite game is Secret of Mana, chiefly because it allowed his friends do all of the work while he sat back and reaped the fruits of their labors. Which doesn't sound familiar at all.

Nathaniel Givens (CTO) - Nathaniel's the only sane one in the company, but he is also the shortest. He too loves gaming, but as a mother loves her red-headed stepchild... so basically, gaming "falls down the stairs" quite often. As Nathaniel's specialties lie in systems design, he's mostly responsible for crushing Aujang's hopes and dreams, much to Tyler's delight. But hidden within his nebulous core is a deep love for elegance, so even as he maniacally dismembers Aujang's naive ideas, he often proposes a new and better solution. (Well, maybe not often.) Nathaniel's favorite game is Halo, because he's a psychopath who enjoys shooting things. No seriously; he has guns. More than one.

How we met

The genesis of SRRN boils down to two eternal truths: Aujang is a genius, and Tyler is an opportunistic capitalist pig. (For the record, Aujang is also a capitalist pig.) Both co-founders spent their formative years in the "golden era" of gaming: those 16-bit glory days of the SNES (and Genesis, for the four of you that had one) that spawned a slew of classics, and a generation of children with disproportionately large thumbs. In short, Aujang and Tyler grew up playing games.

So how did this translate into the fearsome entity known as SRRN? The stages went something like this: Aujang wrote a long, probably boring paper on the philosophy of game design. Tyler read it, deduced that Aujang was a genius, and then convinced Aujang that he should consider making a game. Aujang (being innocent and pure of heart) trusted Tyler, and then proposed that instead of making a game, the two should found a company, and use that company to make (gasp!) more than one game. This served to further cement Tyler's conviction in Aujang's genius, and thus SRRN was born.

Enter Nathaniel, the 3rd partner. Rather than describe the circumstances of his initiation to Team Awesome, SRRN instead resolved to tell you an analogous story. Imagine you are a young, idealistic child, playing in a sandbox. It is a beautiful day, full of sun and delight: birds are chirping, and you can't help but smile as you build an awkward (but endearing) sand castle in your back yard. (Your rosy cheeks dimple as you smile, too; you are one cute kid.) You work for a few hours, toiling painstakingly over this castle--you even make little sand sentries. Once it's finished, you sit back and admire your work, the warm glow of accomplishment spreading through your cherubic body.

Your tiny ears hear a snap, and you look up just in time to see an angry, ferocious Rottweiler barreling towards your sandbox, gnashing its teeth. Even from this distance you can smell its unwashed body, and what is probably the blood of its last victim in its maw. You scramble out of the sandbox, panic flooding your senses, and let out a wail as you launch yourself up the nearest tree. Glancing back in terror, you watch the dog throw itself into the sandbox, and summarily destroy everything you built, barking furiously as it thrashes in the sand. Once the destruction is complete, it slowly turns turns to face you, and with the most hate-filled glare you've yet seen in your short years on this Earth, it relieves itself on the broken remnants of your once-glorious sand castle. With a final snarl, the Rottweiler turns, gingerly avoiding the shattered ruins of your labors, and races off to find its next victim.

And then, it starts to rain.