ExitEvent’s article about Racery, written by Laura Braverman, has a nice summary of Racery’s origin story, which grounds and the fact that our former colleague Bruno Sokic’s brother lives in Sweden. Oh, and zombies. 

The idea came after a former Blogads employee started to use the Zombies, Run! app, which plays music during a run until a voice breaks in to inform you that zombies are chasing you. For a period of time, you must speed up to outrun the zombies. The employee wanted to play against his brother who lives in Sweden, but there wasn’t a way to do it at the time. Two years later, Copeland’s team began using a software tool called IDoneThis to keep track of everyone’s daily accomplishments. At the end of each day, the app sends employees an email asking for a bulleted list of the things they did that day. The app aggregates all the responses and sends them to the entire team. It gives the team a sense of cohesiveness, Copeland says.

That same employee eventually dreamt up a way to combine the competition aspect of the running app with the email functionality of IDoneThis and the mapping capability of Google Maps. The site, originally called Runwme.comm launched early in 2014, and hundreds of races have happened since that time. Copeland calls it “bizarrely addictive.” It turns every day into a race. 

Are all origin stories, by their nature, resolutely random and filled with mythical creatures?  (Think about Genesis or Greek mythology.)