#2875: Richard Gaeta et al.

Phoenix Interactive is (or was?) a company committed to the development of Bible-based computer games. They don’t – based on what we can find – seem to have accomplished much since their start-up, but the developers have a ready explanation for that: When their attempt to fund the development of the game Bible Chronicles: The Call of Abraham through a Kickstarter campaign failed, co-founder Richard Gaeta had the explanation ready: Satan. As opposed to the reason why the vast majority of such start-ups fail to secure funding, the reason they failed was not due to anything they did or failed to do, but because Satan was literally working to confound their plans: “I believe that, 100 percent,” said Gaeta, thus inadvertently helping to make a couple of alternative hypotheses that would explain their failure rather salient. His business partner Martin Bertram agreed: “It’s very tangible. From projects falling through and people that were lined up to help us make this a success falling through. Lots of factors raining down on us like fire and brimstone.” And as Ken Frech, apparently a ‘religious mentor’ to the project, points out, “if Satan is rallying some of his resources to forestall, delay, or kill this project, I think, this must be a perceived threat to his kingdom. I fully would expect something like this to have spiritual warfare. Look at the gospel accounts of demons and so forth. That’s reality. Many Americans don’t believe it anymore. That doesn’t change reality.” It isn’t, but the Phoenix Initiative group appears to have a rather tenuous grasp of the border between reality and delusional imagination.

 

Gaeta and Bertram also believes that the World is 6000 years old and created in seven days, just as described in the Bible – Gaeta scoffs at the notion that Bible stories are allegories and firmly believes that the stories surrounding Abraham in the Bible literally happened as described in the Book of Genesis. Bertram also dismisses the theory of evolution as “wrong”, but there is probably little point in asking ‘on what grounds’.

 

Gaeta has more recently been associated with something called Joshua Tree Entertainment, which we strongly suspect is engaged in similar projects.

 

Diagnosis: Well, they beat the Onion to a funny article, and did as good a job of it as the Onion would have done – there’s even a deeply sad undercurrent to their story that the Onion probably wouldn’t have managed to capture as well as they did.