This Company of Atheists Made Bible Video Games | A Review of Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham
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A development team comprised mainly of atheists and agnostics making a Bible themed video game aimed at the then-untapped Christian market. It seems blasphemous. And it may be. But more relevantly, as Gabe Durham reminds us in his book Bible Adventures, it’s business. So how did this game based on Christian stories and icons make its way onto a Nintendo console? And should you read or should you avoid this book?
Welcome to Burning Books. I’m Caleb, and I want to help you love video games even more. I’m doing that today by continuing to read and review every book in the Boss Fight Books catalog. I believe that by learning more about the games we love, we can learn to love those games even more. Today I’m reviewing Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham…but what will I review in the future. Subscribe to stay notified.
Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham tells the story of Color Dreams, a video game developer from the late 1980s to mid-90s most known for developing Christian-themed games that prompted the Lord to say, and I quote, “it was not good.”
Bible Adventures, the game, is the product of Wisdom Tree, an arm of Color Dreams, which retro gaming fans will recognize as one of the game publishers that made Nintendo angry by circumventing the 10NES lockout chip, which allowed Color Dreams to publish games on the Nintendo Entertainment System without getting the approval of Nintendo. Already, you can probably sense a story here, right? The hypocrisy alone is ripe for unpacking. We’ve got a Christian-themed game publisher taking, maybe not illegal, but definitely ethnically ambiguous means to sell their product.
Why wouldn’t Color Dreams simply abide by Nintendo’s rules to get the games officially licensed? Why would a seemingly morally just company be willing to break these rules? And why is Bible Adventures such a really bad game? Like the Lord said, “It was not good,” …(looking up) but you said light was good, and light allowed me to see this game, so you’re not off the hook, Lord.
The game is narratively absurd, mechanically a mess, and despite it’s advertised purpose, teaches the player little to nothing about the Bible.
I’m not Christian–perhaps obviously, considering the Lord-blaming I did just a few sentences ago–but when a product like Bible Adventures is charged with, even in perhaps a very small way, being the conduit by which we answer the question “what pleases Christians,” I feel bad for Christianity. For every Christian out there who had to pretend to like Bible Adventures as a kid simply because of its Biblical themes, I’m sorry.
Color Dreams–and all console game developers hoping to publish games on Nintendo hardware in the 80s and 90s–knew of Nintendo’s strict stance on religions iconography in games. These guidelines, originally written in 1988, forbade, from any officially licensed Nintendo game “symbols that are related to any type of racial, religious, nationalistic, or ethnic group, such as crosses, pentagrams, God, Gods (Roman mythological gods are acceptable), Satan, hell, Buddha.”
So, certain that Nintendo wouldn’t officially license games heavy on Christian imagery, Wisdom Tree had no choice but to publish unlicensed copies. That would seem the answer to the question of Why, right? However, remember that Wisdom Tree is an arm of Color Dreams, and Color Dreams had already been making unlicensed games for the NES, most of which wouldn’t have been filtered out via Nintendo’s guidelines.
The real answer as to why Color Dreams didn’t officially license their games through Nintendo: 1) It was really expensive to do so, and 2) they had access to unique technology that let them bypass the 10NES lockout chip, the mechanism Nintendo used to prevent unlicensed games from playing on the NES. It was only later that the idea to do Christian-themed games came up. Color Dreams owner Dan Lawton, jokingly suggested that they “make a game with Jesus jumping around.” And Color Dreams was uniquely positioned to make such a game. Through a skewed lens, some would say Color Dreams even had the moral imperative to do so. The logic being that kids should have wholesome games that teach them about God, and since Nintendo didn’t allow it, someone had find a way, as ethically dubious as it may be.
But Color Dreams, a studio made up mostly of atheists and agnostics, was motivated not by faith but by money. At that time, there wasn’t such thing as a Christian market. Christian bookstores existed, but mostly to sell Christian books. Lawton saw an opportunity and ran with it.
Gabe Durham distills the central theme beautifully (pg 74):
The fact that Lawton’s decision to make Bible games was based on money and not faith is more the rule than the exception in retail.
The cynical way of putting it is that these companies are squeezing dollars out of people who think that buying Christian merch is in some way supporting Christianity itself. The generous way of putting it is that the companies are offering inspirational goods to a Christian public who demands products that “get it right.”
The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in between.
Gabe Durham does a fantastic job of taking this central concept and approaching it from multiple angles without resorting to fully demonizing nor fully praising Color Dreams and Wisdom Tree. Durham is open about his own history with Christianity, some of that history being positive, some negative, and seems at the time of writing Bible Adventures to be neither devout nor antagonistic towards Christianity. This even-keel approach is what makes Bible Adventures enjoyable to read. Had Durham been on any one side of the religion spectrum, the book would have been either absurdly evangelistic or lazily snarky. Ultimately, this is a book for people passionate about video game history, not about Christianity, and thank you to Gabe Durham for never veering away from that important focus.
Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham is a great history of Color Dreams, and I absolutely recommend it for anyone interested in unlicensed Nintendo games, Christian marketing, and of course to those, like me, who are reading every one of the Boss Fight Books releases. I know you are out there. Let’s be friends. Subscribe to this channel and share this video with all of your video game and book reading friends.
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Music Credits
8bit Dungeon Level Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
