Maximum Letdown Special: Christian Themed Video Games

Disclaimer: Powet.tv, its staff, and its writers are in no way Anti-Christian or Anti-Religious. If your religious beliefs (or lack thereof), be they Christian, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Bhuddist, Scientologist, Wiccan, or otherwise, drive you to be a better person, then more power to you. My beef is, without getting too preachy or political, with those who use religion to justify hatred, those who wish to force their beliefs upon others, and more importantly, crappy video games, be they religious or otherwise.

Today is marks Hallmarks annual day to bask in the fruits of rampant consumerism. More importantly for Christians, today marks Jesus’ birthday. Our regular $20 GOTW and Lost Classics will return tomorrow afternoon, but today, Powet has a special Christmas gift for you. Though there is much debate on just how separate church should be from state it seems that religion should be kept as far away as possible from video gaming as possible. Not because of offensive material (most of these games carry good messages) mind you, but more so because of how bad many of them turn out. Powet will be taking a special look at religious-themed video games, more significantly, NES games by Christian gaming company Wisdom Tree. While Wisdom Tree and other designers of these types of games meant well, most of the games themselves were just plain awful.

Wisdom Tree was an offshoot of Color Dreams (a name you’ll also be seeing here before long so I won’t go into their complete history), who was one of the few NES publishers who operated outside of Nintendo’s licensing program, going so far as to reverse engineer a workaround for the NES lockout chip. This would be amazing (given Nintendo’s ultra-strict licensing policies at the time), but unfortunately a good 95 percent of their games were crap and had trouble running properly. Things got so bad that Color Dreams formed a sub label called Bunch Games to release lower-quality games so as to not harm their reputation further. Picture that for a moment, a game developer sucking so bad they they resort to creating a sub label to deliberately release bad games. Anyway, someone got the idea to release really crappy games based on Christian themes, and thus Wisdom Tree was born. Since Nintendo put pressure on mainstream gaming retailers not to sell unlicensed NES products, Wisdom Tree market their product to Christian bookstores. This was genius, since Christian bookstores don’t sell video games and therefore wouldn’t be subject to Nintendo’s pressuring. Despite their quality, the games sold reasonably well to Christian audiences. Most of their games however were ripoffs. Either they were rip-offs of more popular games or they were total conversions of Color Dream’s own titles.

The first game from Wisdom Tree was Bible Adventures. It’s a three-pack of bible based games, all three of them borrowing liberally from Super Mario Brothers 2. Noah’s Ark has the player knocking animals out and stacking them up (even carrying many of them at once) in order to get them onto the ark. Baby Moses has players controlling Mariam as she tries to get Baby Moses to safety. She carries him over her head and can even throw him, but nothing will be harmed, he’ll just sit there smiling. You have to finish the entire level holding him, otherwise you’ll get a message saying “Good Job, but you forgot baby Moses!” David and Goliath has players herding sheep and avoiding creatures as he gets his slingshot and uses it to fight Goliath. Seeing as how they are Christian games, you collect scrolls with bible verses on them to restore health. Despite it’s lousy gameplay, the game’s success encouraged the company to go ahead with more Christian related video games.

Spiritual Warfare was another title, although the game was ‘inspired’ by Zelda. Playing as a soldier in God’s army, you use the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ to convert nonbelievers and defeat demons. You battle boss characters to gain the 6 pieces of the armor of god. The game makes use of the same engine as another Wisdom Tree effort, Bible Buffet, which despite its title, has little to do with Christianity other than random trivia sections. Bible Buffet and Spiritual Warfare were surprisingly pretty decent (well compared to other Wisdom Tree/Color Dreams titles), with the former giving players a decent 4-player party game years before Mario Party and the latter, although being a Zelda rip-off, turned out to be a fairly competent one.

Which is more than I can say for Sunday Funday. In this platformer, players control a kid on his skateboard trying to make it to Sunday school, fighting clowns, plumbers, frogs, old ladies, and other things trying to block his way. This game is particularly notable for being a remake of an earlier Color Dreams game, Menace Beach with the graphics replaced and the story changed from the hero having to rescue his girlfriend to the hero having to get to Sunday school. More shockingly, the screens in between levels of Menace Beach depicted the hero’s girlfriend chained to a wall, her clothes rotting away until she is left in her underwear. These screens have been replaced with images of a fully clothed Sunday school teacher giving advice. Menace Beach was released in 1990, and Sunday Funday, which is a conversion of Menace Beach, was released in 1995. Say what you will about Acclaim, but Color Dreams apparently got so lazy that they ripped off a game they released 5 years earlier. On a side note, Sunday Funday was the last game released on the NES, licensed or unlicensed.

Most of Wisdom Tree’s NES games were re-released on the Sega Genesis, and they even produced an SNES game, Super 3D Noah’s Ark, which uses the game graphics engine as the SNES version of Wolfeinsten, right down to the HUD. Instead of blasting Nazis however, players used fruit to pacify animals. A popular misconception is that ID Software was pissed off at Nintendo for making them censor the SNES version of Wolfenstein 3D, and allowed Wisdom Tree to make this game in order to get back at them. This however, isn’t true. Wisdom Tree simply licensed the engine from ID in order to make this game. As a side note, this is the only unlicensed SNES cartridge in the history of the system. To circumvent the lockout this time, Wisdom Tree designed the cartridge so that players had to insert an ‘official’ NES game in the top in order to play it, kinda like that Sonic & Knuckles cartridge on Genesis.

Even though Color Dreams died off long ago, Wisdom Tree still exists as an independent company today. You can even go to their website at http://www.wisdomtreegames.com, where you can play their NES games online. Thy have also been releasing a number of educational and religious PC games, many of which have been made using the 3D Game Studio program, and in true Color Dreams fashion, they use the assets that come with the program. You can’t knock Wisdom Tree, or any company producing religious-themed games. However, we can knock crap video games. Thus if religious game developers (Christian or otherwise) want gamers to go to church, then they’ll have to put in a little more effort than what we’ve seen so far, especially with recent titles such as the laughably bad PC RTS, Left Behind: Eternal Forces. As the popularity of Wisdom Tree games have shown, there is a market for Christian-themed video gaming, developers simply have to make quality products.