Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham: Book Review
For the record, the library in my church growing up never had NES cartridges. There was a massive wooden table with leather chairs where the adults would hold bible studies in the evenings, plenty of excellent historical books full of pictures, and even a few VHS tapes for kids (mostly “McGee and Me”). I remember wanting to spend most of my time in that room because of the books. When I read Gabe Durham’s book Bible Adventures, and he mentioned there being videogames on the cart of his church library, that old room filled with polished wood and cozy chairs seemed to lose some of its luster.
My friend Michael informed me that at one point there was supposed to be a Hellraiser videogame, and that it was going to be published through a company that made another game called Bible Adventures. At the time that sounded surreal and impossible, so naturally my eyes boggled at him and I responded with a professional, “The hell you say.” He simply smiled, laughed, and began to explain that the company known as Wisdom Tree was, arguably, a bonkers story and that I should definitely check it out.
At the time, I was far, far more fascinated with the writings, films, comics, and visual art of Clive Barker. I was also, and still am today, an atheist who had grown up flooded in the world, culture, and aesthetic of North American Protestant Christianity and had no desire to return to it. Instead, I decided to read The Hellbound Heart and watch the film Nightbreed.
Spoilers: The Hellbound Heart is amazing, Nightbreed, well…it sucks.
Bible Adventures would cross my path again though. One evening after pay-day, I was looking through the catalog of Boss Fight Books and I saw the title. Again there was some reticence on my part because of my lack of desire to learn more about Christianity. However, I was fascinated by the cover which showed two horses stacked on top of each other, and standing on top of them, facing the opposite direction, was a pig. Again, I have to thank my friend Michael, who retold me the story of Wisdom Tree and within a few seconds I added the book to my cart.
Bible Adventures by Gabe Durham is one of the reasons I love the Boss Fight Book Series as much as I do. I personally never would have read anything about a videogame titled Bible Adventures because at this point in my life I’m comfortable admitting I’ve no interest in anything religious. It’s not animosity, or at least not as much as it was a decade ago. I simply want to live my life free of religion and theology. Fortunately Durham’s book is not a religious text, or at least not in a traditional sense. It’s a book about a company that was largely made up of atheists who sold videogames that, on their surface, were christian.
Durham’s book is a history and analysis of the company Wisdom Tree(Originally Color Dreams), a software company that released videogames in the late 1980s for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Durham manages to explain why the company tried to work around Nintendo’s lock-out chips, and wound up fighting (and mostly losing) the battle against the corporation to stock their games in retail markets. There’s a long and honestly pretty interesting story about Nintendo’s domination of the video-game market and the frustrations of software developers, but trying to explain would distract too much from Durham’s book. Instead I’ll just recommend that you check out the video by Norman Caruso(a.k.a. The Videogame Historian) Tengen: Atari Games Vs. Nintendo to get the full story.
Anyway, back to the Bible and atheists.
Durham’s book manages to show through investigation and interviews how the original team of Wisdom Tree decided to work-around Nintendo’s licensing system, as well as their lock-out chip, by taking games they had already made and remaking them in a Christian aesthetic. And if that sounds like an episode of South Park it’s because it is, and Durham literally quotes the episode in the text of his book as well as using one line as an epigraph.
Besides being a gifted writer, Durham’s book bleeds with a beautiful honesty as he observes how his former Christian life informed his current relationships to videogames. And if I’m being honest, having grown up in a staunchly conservative-christian region there’s a familiarity to this book that was not just relatable it was endearing.
In one later passage of the book Durham observes his own spiritual journey and his current relationship with religion after performing all this research. He says:
In this way, Christianity is the retro gaming of my spiritual journey–my thinking has progressed a lot since it came out, but sometimes it’s nice to stare into the simplicity of its boxy pixels and pine for a simpler time. If a church full of people are singing a hymn I know I’m going to sing along. Whether I believe the words I’m singing is almost besides the point. (149)
Durham and I ended on very different paths in terms of our relationships to Christianity. By the end of the book he seems to have arrived at some comfortable distance and closeness to it. Again, I don’t want to let this review be about my atheism, but it is going to inform my impression of the book. I loved the way Durham challenged his Christian upbringing and his eventual distancing from the church because he wrote about it honestly and never indulgently. Reading Bible Adventures is less a book about the corruption that religion can perform, but rather how it’s a system that, like video games, can be altered and even manipulated for selfish purposes. Recognizing this can be depressing and challenge one’s convictions about why one has faith in the first place.
Especially, when money is involved.
Videogames have, since their inception, been wrapped up in capitalism; videogames are products of companies designed to turn a profit. The creative aspirations of the medium have fought against this to try and make games that are as much art as they are engaging programs. Durham manages to show how Bible Adventures helped contribute to a growing consumerism based in, around, and for Christianity, specifically the rise of Christian bookstores. All the consumerism that surrounds this game can almost distract the player from recognising that this is still a videogame and the interactivity of it can lead to some interesting questions.
To wit: Why can’t I play as Jesus?
Durham offers a wonderful explication of this idea when he says:
Surely we can handle depicting Jesus as a playable character. We could kill afternoons in the sandals of history’s best loved, and most deeply misrepresented peacemaker. We could post our favorite moments of Ludo narrative dissonance to YouTube. Maybe we could even get a little training wheels practice at being in the presence of the destitute people, who so many of our mass market games turn into a punchline, help those people instead of stabbing them, and remember in the process that they are, in fact, people, and thus worthy of love and compassion and food.
If the Catholic Church gets to present their blood sweating lord upon every wall and column, if Mel Gibson gets to make Christ play out his every BDSM fantasy on screen for sold out theaters across the world, surely a game company will have the balls to put the player in control of Jesus and then let that player decide what kind of Jesus she wants to be. (88-89).
Naturally Jesus led me to think about Grand Theft Auto.
At the time I’m writing this I’m playing Grand Theft Auto 5, and thoroughly enjoying the game mostly because of Trevor (who deserves an essay unto himself(and not for the reasons you think)). His character is a meth-head psychopath who kills people because he has abandonment issues and also, well, because he’s constantly on meth. The game presents him as a kind of monster, and also, I suspect, a sort of side-eye, tongue-in-cheek, meta-commentary on the reputation of Rock Star Games and the players who enjoy the franchise. Unlike the reputation though, I try to avoid killing pedestrians in the game (partly because I hate the chore of having to get away and/or fight the cops), but also because I don’t want to do that. Far too often the npcs (non-playable characters) in videogames can become targets of sadism, and especially while playing Trevor I know the temptation to just fall into this pattern and start running people over with cars.
It’s the choice to decide how I want to play the game that makes the difference.
Trevor is not Jesus.
Trevore will NEVER be Jesus.
But I can at least try to be a decent soul while playing him.
If there’s any overarching theme in Durham’s book, it is how the intentions of creators can shape the experience of a work of art. Even when they don’t care to do much.
Bible Adventures offered several biblical narratives as set-ups for the games they gave players, one of them being the game Baby Moses where players controlled the mother of the famous biblical figure. Durham observes how Wisdom Tree games were typically inspired (ripped-off) versions of other videogames and Baby Moses was predominantly Super Mario Bros 2 but with a Biblical story for the cover. In Super Mario Bros 2 I could pull roots and vegetables out of the ground to throw at enemies. Baby Moses was similar, mostly because you could throw the baby.
You read that right.
Durham writes about this particular game mechanic in his book saying:
In a different kind of game, this option could be strategic: You might be asked to throw the baby across the gorge to be able to cross it at all or to place Baby Moses on a switch so that you can unlock a necessary door, or to use Baby Moses as a miraculously powerful weapon that kills any pushy Egyptian he encounters. Bible Adventures affords none of these opportunities or challenges; in fact, “Baby Moses” offers no method to fight back against your attackers at all. It is therefore never a good idea to throw Baby Moses.
The reason then that you were able to throw your child is simple: All the characters and Bible adventures have the same controls–elderly Noah, buff young David, and our Levi woman–and the buttons for each Adventure do the same thing: run, jump, pick up, and throw. Wisdom Tree could’ve programmed each of these three games to have different controls based on the needs of each game, but it would’ve taken more work. (52-53)
This quote, to me, perfectly encapsulates everything Durham tries to present and argue for in his book.
Bible Adventures exists, largely because a group of programmers wanted to make and sell videogames. The content and quality of the games themselves were largely irrelevant, and only became as focused as they were once it became clear there was a way around an oppressive market monopoly. Durham notes in his book that the reason Wisdom Tree managed to survive as long as they did, while other competitors like Atari and Tengen were eventually shut down through legal channels, was because Nintendo knew attacking a religious product would be a PR nightmare, especially when many parents already had concerns the company was not doing enough for the intellectual growth of children.
And on that note, Durham shows how he, as a young christian boy, managed to use “learning” as a justification for playing the game. He writes:
Wisdom Tree craftily built a learning component into each of their games to appeal to kids like me. Little Gabe, not reading his Bible enough? There’s Bible verses, and/or trivia in every game.
How you get to the trivia changes from game to game. In Bible Adventures you simply read verses off tablets and get an extra unit of health, even if you skip quickly past it, and verses in Sunday Funday are similarly skippable. In King of Kings, though, you collect scrolls, and must answer questions correctly to get the extra health. In Joshua and Exodus, sets of questions show up between levels. In Bible Buffet you’re asked to refer to a quiz book that comes with the game and presented only with a question number, and the letters A, B, C, and D. And in Spiritual Warfare, if you convert/kill enough guys, an angel floats aimlessly on screen in the matter of the Zelda fairy, upon which the angel was clearly based. Catch the staggering angel, and he quizzes you. (102).
Looking at my own youth I remember how much product was offered to me as a way to deepen and explore my faith in Christ and god. And as a sadder and wiser adult I’ve come to recognise how much of it was cheap, mass-produced crap that was only ever about trying to create an aesthetic that was as hollow as it was forgettable. Posters, t-shirts, stickers, necklaces, films, books, guest-speakers, music, etc., all of it created a world of Christianity that didn’t actually reflect anything about the stories that were present in the bible. And if I can offer myself anything in the way of kind words (which trust me is unusual for me), I still consider it impressive how early I saw it all as nothing but a cheap con.
Christianity existed to take my money, and my time.
Bible Adventures existed for the exact same reason.
So many books about videogames are about extolling their virtues or else defending them as a medium worthy of people’s time and consideration. Durham’s book was a beautiful accomplishment because it managed the same thing about a videogame that didn’t seemingly deserve any of that. It was a crap videogame that was made simply to make money and was, in hindsight, probably worth less than the silicone and plastic that made up its cartridge.
I love Durham’s book because it gave me an opportunity to see a history and analysis of a videogame that wasn’t a best-seller, a triple-A title, or a niche indie-game that has impacted players and game designers.
Books about videogames that many people know and played are important, but a healthy discourse should be as much about the works that failed as the ones that succeeded. And Durhams gift as a writer is offering himself as much as his analysis. By the end I had read a beautiful human account of experiencing Christianity, observing the shallowness that existed in its culture, accounted how it was exploited for financial gain, and then ultimately finding a new comfortable ground with a system that, while no longer a part of his daily life, still meant something in his heart.
Like I said before, Durham and I wound up at different places in our spiritual journeys, and while I’m more than happy to leave Christianity behind me, it’s still a beautiful testament to this book that by the end of, there was at least one more story in it’s cultural legacy to make me look back in curiosity.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
4.1.2024
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