A review by gengelcox
Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham

informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

Before this book, I had never heard of this game, so everything here was entirely new. Except. As someone raised in a Christian household, I connected immediately to Durham’s description of the Church library and its eclectic selection of materials deemed appropriate for members. Ours didn’t have videogames, but that may have been because consoles were still new during my time and they may have added games like Bible Adventures in the 90s. For someone who loved libraries, I was disappointed that the church library had such narrow interests in the materials made available, almost as if they didn’t want to introduce anything to make people question. (Even then, some of their material still led to that kind of analysis, including a particular volume I remember about the cult nature of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that led me in a different direction than the authors likely intended.)

So how did a videogame company decide to create a series of Nintendo games based on Christian ideology when the programmers and executives weren’t believers themselves. Ah, capitalism, thy name is legion, and in this case was called Wisdom Tree, the makers of Bible Adventures and a number of other cartridges. Even better, at a time when Nintendo strictly ruled the toy stores and others that sold the games for its platform by forcing a hardware component necessary for the console to “accept” and run the game, Wisdom Tree had technology that bypassed this. Toys ‘R’ Us still wouldn’t carry their unauthorized games, but Wisdom Tree had discovered the Christian bookstore market, and that provided enough sales to keep it afloat until the Internet changed that (not to mention the boom and bust of console platforms).

A great insight into the burgeoning videogame business and worthy of your time if you have an interest in electronic gaming history.