One of the benefits of his father’s job was paper. That was my first encounter with entertainment,” Vu said. ![]() It was the biggest thing ever to happen to Norfolk, I think. ![]() “Whenever they did ‘Johnny Carson comes home,’ I remember that TV crew coming to town. The family lived in a house not far from Johnny Carson’s boyhood home. His parents, who left a successful coffee-and-tea business behind in Vietnam, worked as janitors, initially. He grew up in Norfolk, Nebraska, far from the tech and entertainment hubs of Silicon Valley and Hollywood. SkyVuĪt 37, Vu is an unlikely tech entrepreneur. Since launching for mobile in 2009, "Battle Bears" has been downloaded more than 24 million times. Vu’s goal is to create an entertainment empire, starting with the Battle Bears – cartoon characters compared in the gaming press both to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Angry Birds. Two “Battle Bears” game soundtrack albums sell on iTunes, and the Omaha company is now working on a Web series with Google. SkyVu has grown from three employees to 35 and counting. Since it launched in 2009, mobile gamers have downloaded “Battle Bears” more than 24 million times. They’ve always told me that story throughout childhood. ![]() “It kind of parallels the story my family tells of moving from Vietnam to America, that treacherous journey. “The Battle Bears is a sci-fi journey from one end of futuristic America to the other end,” Vu said. Three decades later, Ben started his own company, SkyVu (pronounced sky-voo) Entertainment, and used these stories as his inspiration for a mobile game called “ Battle Bears.” The family emigrated to a small town in Nebraska, where Ben was born, but the story of how the family escaped 38 years ago this month became part of the family lore – real-life bedtime stories of daring and danger young Ben never tired of hearing. Ben Vu’s parents and older brother fled South Vietnam by boat in 1975 – in the chaotic and violent final days before Saigon fell to communist forces from the north.
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