Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Potatoes: A Magical Recipe for Video Game Realism

SOpa (Spanish for “soup”) is a game about a young boy who goes to get potatoes for his grandma and finds himself lost in a magical world at the back of the pantry. “It feels like the pantry is getting longer and longer,” explains creative director Juan Castañeda. “And as he tries to grab a bag of potatoes, he's drawn into another world of fantasy and magical realism. He goes on different adventures and meets different characters, but at the end of the day, he's just trying to get potatoes for grandma's soup.”

As video game quests go, this is surprisingly mundane — not unlike rescuing a princess trapped in a castle or saving a land in peril — but you soon discover there's more to it than just the lost potato. “There's another layer to the story, and that's what the game is really about,” says Castañeda. “Every time you return to the kitchen, things change in unexpected ways, and with each adventure you pick up hints about a mysterious traveler who passed these paths long ago.”

An ancient mystery lies behind your initial quest to find cooking ingredients, and as the game progresses, elements of magical realism come to the forefront, making it “a little hard to know what's fantasy and what's reality,” Castaneda said.

Sopa is being developed by StudioBando, a team of around a dozen developers working remotely across countries including Colombia, Mexico, Argentina and the US, who have previously worked on mobile titles. Super Best Ghost Game “Sopa will be the studio's first release for consoles and PC, but Castañeda hails from Colombia, the birthplace of magical realist author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and he says that Marquez's novels, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, were a major influence on Sopa.

“He's a kind of national treasure, a national hero,” Castañeda said, noting that Márquez's presence can be seen throughout the country. “We grew up hearing his stories, we grew up reading his books. It's something that is deeply ingrained in the heart of every Colombian.”

Colombia also has deep roots in Sopa. Castañeda says the game is based on his grandmother's house in a rural Colombian town swallowed up by a growing city. “It was a traditional colonial house with a big garden,” he says, recalling the place always bustling thanks to his grandmother's 15 children. “Some of them had their own children, and the house was always bustling,” he recalls. “Every room was always full.”

In contrast, Sopa offers a quieter experience, at least at first. The young protagonist, Miho, is bored hanging out watching TV at her grandmother's house and reluctantly gets up to help prepare soup. The show he's watching, The Voltage Templars, is a homage to the Power Rangers that Castañeda remembers as a child, just one of the many American and Japanese shows that flooded Colombian television.

“There wasn't much Colombian media at the time, other than radio,” he says. “As a kid, I wanted foreign frozen yogurt, I wanted to watch American shows, I wanted to read foreign books, and I ignored a lot of the really beautiful and special things around me.” Miho's reunion with her own culture forms the basis of Sopa, as she dives into a world steeped in Latin American traditions. “Through these adventures, you pick up the pieces of these traditions and learn to appreciate them.”

Sopa appears to be part of a trend, alongside games like 2023 award-winning Venba, about reconnecting with cultural traditions through cooking, and Indonesian hit A Space for the Unbound, as creators increasingly depict cultures outside the U.S., Europe, and Japan that have traditionally dominated video games. “Maybe people all over the world are feeling the same way I am, and telling personal stories about their place,” Castaneda says.

Besides Garcia Marquez, Castañeda said The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Pinocchio, and especially the Pixar film Coco were major influences on Sopa. Though the idea was born about 10 years ago, the game's development has been ongoing for about five years, starting with studio co-founders Castañeda, Holt, and co-writer Nelson Guevara. “We all basically went back home to finish the game and keep costs down,” Castañeda said.

“It's not like we had a ton of money saved up from previous successes. It was a really humble start and quite tough. It was very hard to get support for a long time.” He pitched the game to publishers but was rejected one after the other, with companies unwilling to believe the team could realise their ambitions or doubting that there was a market for it.

Meanwhile, Castañeda says he received plenty of support from his peers in the gaming industry. “For a long time, no one was willing to back the project and help us make it, but personally, I had a lot of supporters and people with beliefs in the gaming industry who helped us get the project out there.” The big breakthrough came at a meeting with Microsoft. “We pitched the game, but it wasn't even a video call, it was just audio, so I had no idea what they thought,” Castañeda recalls. “Then, a week later, in the middle of the night, I got an email saying they liked the project and wanted to back it.

“I remember calling my teammates in tears to tell them the news, because that day I had been talking to my advisors and I was like, 'Was I just stupid? The Earth is showing us that we shouldn't make this game. Nothing is happening to us.' And then that same night I got the news that they were going to help us out with an initial investment.”

That was last fall, in the midst of a tumultuous time in the games industry, with frequent layoffs and studio closures, “everything crashing and burning around us and just being scared,” Castaneda says. Perhaps Sopa is not just a game about reconnecting with Latin American traditions, but also a game about tenacity and, above all, hope.