Christian video games are so bad they're good

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I didn’t get any feedback earlier so I’m just going to do whatever I want lol. This week I’m experimenting with a slightly different format focussing on variations on one topic.

Wisdom Tree Games is a lesson for us all

This week I was listening to Good Christian Fun’s latest episode about the song To Hell With The Devil by the Christian hair metal band Stryper (who I first heard of via Elliot Page’s t-shirt from Whip It - a very good movie directed by Drew Barrymore please watch it!)

They’re joined by Nick Wiger, from How Did This Get Played, a video game podcast. So as you’d expect, there’s a lot of discussion about Christian video games. I went and found the episode about Bible Adventures, an unlicensed NES game designed for the evangelical Christian market (content about the game starts 27:50).

It is widely regarded as terrible (HDTGP unanimously gave it a score of 0 out of 10), but it sold 350,000 copies via Christian book stores.

Twist: The makers were not Christians! It was a cynical cash grab. There’s probably a whole think piece to be written about this, but Wisdom Tree is a telling example of the exploitability of evangelicals as a demographic for commercial and political ends.

As Nick Wiger says on the podcast:

This is like an old grift. This is like, you pander to evangelicals with some slipshod product and you break all the rules to do so and you profit handsomely. I mean that’s like 2020 - that’s like our past four years. We’ve just been seeing that same shit. It’s just like a classic American grift.

Wisdom tree went on to make several other biblically-themed titles, including Super 3D Noah’s Ark, a first person “shooter” where Noah flings sleep-inducing fruit at angry animals in the ark.

Fun fact: it was initially meant to be a video game adaptation of the horror movie Hellraiser built on the Wolfenstein 3D engine, but when Doom came out they knew they couldn’t compete, so changed the theme to match their other biblically-themed games.

If you want to check out these games for yourself, my god you’re in luck! Wisdom Tree still exists (but parts of their website are very broken). You can also find some of their games on Steam.

And, there’s a relatively healthy community of people who speedrun the games - tricky to do, considering the controls are impossibly bad and gameplay is interrupted so often with Bible verses.

Here’s Linkums (brother of Andrew Mark Henry from Religion for Breakfast..!) doing a speedrun of the Wisdom Tree title King of Kings.

Stop everything! There is a VeggieTales dancing game with a dance mat

Christian RPG Maker games

RPG Maker is a program that lets you create your very own Japanese-style RPG. It’s almost as old as me, but I only came across it a few years ago when I started noticing a lot of similar-looking games crop up on Steam.

Of course, creating an accessible game maker means that a lot of people are going to use it to make religious games. My partner and I found one of these in 2018 called Alpha/Omega which we didn’t love but it seems to have a small and dedicated fanbase.

I’ve played a few others, and most of them aren’t to my taste, EXCEPT for Jubilee, made by my Twitter mutual @gayleviticus. I’ve played most of it, and it’s good - and free!! It uses the default RPG Maker graphics but GayLeviticus has put a lot of thought into the mechanics so I highly recommend.

Here’s a few other examples - not sure of their quality but one is set in the world before Noah’s flood, which as a game concept… absolutely slaps? I love it??

Also did you know there is a Left Behind real time strategy game?

I could not believe my eyes, but everyone’s favourite sucked-in-we-win Christian apocalypse book series was made into a video game. It came out in 2006 and it’s called Left Behind: Eternal Forces.

According to Wikipedia:

…the player's main goal is to use conversion rather than violence, only resorting to combat when necessary, since killing causes the "spirit level" of the player's units to drop. If the "spirit level" of a player's unit drops too low, the unit will turn neutral or defect to the GCP (Global Community Peacekeepers), which can cause the player to lose the game.

I’ve noticed a lot of these games employ pacifist gameplay mechanics - I guess to stay family friendly. But the audience that consumes them (White American evangelical Christians) is known for unwavering support of the United States millitary! A whole thing.

Can we please just talk about Captain Bible for a second?

I have never played most of the Christian video games described above, but I DID play Captain Bible in Dome of Darkness - several times. I revisited it a few years ago and I can assure you it’s terrible, but the artwork is FANTASTIC.

Uh, SPOILERS I guess, but check out these screenshots of the first boss - a false prophet being worshipped by a woman led astray.

You can see a playthough of this section of the game here (start around 3:10). All the rest of the graphics and character design are just as good. Here’s some gameplay footage that gives you and idea about how it looks and feels.

Speaking of graphics and art, I found someone on DeviantArt who did some Captain Bible fan art lmao. The artist writes:

I would also like to add that I headcanon Captain Bible as being gay and on the spectrum. Am I projecting? Possibly, but consider this: there is not a goddamned thing the world can do to stop me.

I support it. Anyway, you can play the game in browser on Internet Archive, or I’m sure it’s easy to find a version to play in a DOS emulator.

All done

I think my next post will be a meme roundup with less written content, so I’ll save the “more posts” section for then.

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