When you make a video?

Why make video games based off the Bible when most of the time they suck?

• In 1982, John and Phil Conrod made the first Christian video game. It was called the Bible Computers and was released for the TRS-80 Color Computer and then a lot of other consoles including the VIC-20 and MS-DOS. Pretty soon, other Christian video games followed in that same decade. Companies decided to capitalise on the genre and make money, probably converting to Christianity in the process. The most infamous array of Christian video games came out in the 90s. A video game company called Colour Dreams was making unlicensed video games for the NES. These games included Raid 2020, Captain Comic and, most notably, Menace Beach. Nintendo included a 10NES chip in the NES console, which meant that only NES games published, developed or licensed by Nintendo could work and unlicensed games wouldn't. But Colour Dreams found a way to bypass it. They used technology licensed from the company Tengen which used a voltage zap to get past the NES' security mechanism. For unknown reasons, Colour Dreams changed it's name to Wisdom Tree and started making Christian games for the NES, using the same method to bypass the 10NES chip. They basically recycled their previous games and added Christian themes to them. For instance, Menace Beach was changed to Sunday Funday in 1995, and Crystal Mines was changed Exodus: Journey to the Promised Land, which was later recycled into a similar game called Joshua. All the Bible-based games sucked, but the method of bypassing the 10NES chip was impressive I have to admit. When the Nintendo was working on the SNES, they must have figured out how unlicensed games managed to get through. So they built a new lockout chip to keep them out, and only one ever got through. That was Super 3D Noah's Ark, which, as it happens, is basically a clone of Wolfenstein 3D. The graphics were changed but the game was still a massive failure. There are still Christian games being made and I'm sure most of them have a bad reception, most notably Left Behind: Eternal Forces. It caused controversy when themes of religous intolerance and bigotry were brought to light. Even Jack Thompson himself cut his ties with one of his friends who made the game. No violence in the game was rewarded and you mostly had to do it only in desperation, but it was still remembered as the most infamous Christian game ever. Aside from that why make games based on the Bible? Most of them, if not all of them, would suck.

• Answer:

  Even though they may suck (and they do, my parents used to buy them for me), people make Bible video games because there is a market there for them. Christian parents will buy their children games based off of the Bible because that exposes the children to Bible themes in their entertainment. The parents are going to look at all the games out there which seem to disagree with their beliefs, and they'll see those few Christian games as an oasis of virtue in an industry otherwise centered around violence and sin.