Wisdom Tree did one thing good, provide games for kids that may have been not allowed to play games otherwise. Growing up I absolutely knew kids who only had these games.
Same here, and I cannot find it in me to feel like their parents were being "exploited". If anything, the existence of these games made it easier for their children to understand how stifling their parents were, and later escape that environment and go on to live happy and fulfilling lives.
Ugh, the bad thing about the 90's was so many religious fanatical parents that destroyed our toys. They were the stupid unstable lunatics and they blamed us and our toys/games for their own inner demons.
I couldn't imagine being socially isolated like that growing up. My dad was very religious and yet even he didn't do that. This type of isolation was a major premise in the movie "Carrie" , and people might think that the mother was just some super extreme example cooked up by Hollywood writers trying to be as dramatic as they could. However, a lot of kids in the real world went through stuff like that, and were ostracized by their peers in school. And then there were kids who went through MUCH worse. 😱
Wisdom Tree made at least one other Game Boy game, that being Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, which I got with the manual. It sadly only works on the original Game Boy and Game Boy pocket, as it requires the Nintendo logo boot up to run properly. I even called Wisdom Tree that day (in 1999) to ask about some notes in the manual explaining how to run the game in the PC and Genesis, and possibly the NES, but got their answering machine, and I thought I heard a different company's name, so I hang up. They called me back later to see what I had called about, and when I basically reiterated everything I said here, before aswerinf the question, the lady who called me back asked what game I had found. When I said it was Joshua, she called me a fortunate soul and said that was one they couldn't get anymore, the others being Spiritual Warfare and Exodus. The lady then explained to me that the game is in fact not playable on anything but the Game Boy, but that they wrote the manual to contain the instructions for all platforms they released it for, as sort of a one size fits all, which made sense. She then offered to send me a catalog of the games they still offered, and I took her up on it. I never bought anything from it, but it was very cool to have that conversation, and to learn that they were still in business.
"You just winged him and made him a Unitarian." Probably one of the funniest lines the show ever had. Anyway... Nintendo cash-grab = good; pretty ingeniously getting around Nintendo's iron fist = bad? Nothing was stolen. Nothing was destroyed. Nintendo probably made more money in the end because more people bought the NES for these games and then started buying official NES games.
Both stories are correct. Early releases used the voltage method, but later ones and reprints were using reverse engineered chips, though in case of re-releases manual stayed the same. The only way to know if you have later version with reverse engineered chip is to either open it up or launch and see if it is starting instantly.
@@UltimatePerfection I got Bible Adventures and King of Kings from “The Ark: Christian Book Store” and rented Spiritual Warfare from them enough times to finish it but never noticed flashing other than the usual difficulties getting any NES game to work… however my current copies (also from the early ‘90s) definitely use the charge and shock method. I assumed I just didn’t notice when I was a kid and it would zap the chip while I was still jiggling and resetting manually but two different methods over time might also explain it. That said, of course the modern copies use a clone CIC key… but were they ever using one during the console’s retail life? I’m still not sure, but I know they used the shock method since that’s how the ones I still have work. :) The video seems to imply that they updated the carts to work with revisions like the NES-101 “toploader” when, in fact, that was the one that would have just worked regardless. It was later versions of the original NES-001 “frontloader” that had revisions to protect the CIC lock from the shock attack.
Hot take - Spiritual Warfare was an obvious LOZ copycat -- but not a really poorly done copycat. The world was huge with a lot to explore, sprites were simple, but responsiveness and hit detection, enemy 'ai' all were acceptable. The Bible themes were incorporated in a way that did not come off as disingenuous or exploitative. It was a pretty fun and rewarding game and I think is a solidly mid NES game - far more playable and fun than much of the lower tier fare like say LJN's X-Men.
Yeah, I'd agree with this. It's decent. In a world full of Zeldalikes, there's no particular reason to play it specifically, but it was a good-enough game. Probably the best thing Wisdom Tree put out, at least from what I've seen.
I rented it a few times and beat Spiritual Warfare back when I still thought Zelda was just a game with randomly spawning enemies and no goal/point. It blew me away. Imagine my surprise when I found out Zelda was the real thing.
This was definitely a refreshing take on the topic of Wisdom Tree and their infamous bible games! Usually the focus is on the quality of the games themselves, rather than the surprisingly interesting history behind them. Excellent work!
Their game, "Spiritual Warfare", was a genuinely good game. Different enough from other top-down games like Legend of Zelda, it was large, challenging, fun, and creative. Can't really say that about anything else they made, but that game was a genuine one-hit wonder.
Just to toss in, Sega not suing Wisdom Tree may have also been connected to them losing a lawsuit against Accolade over unlicensed games, although I haven't looked deeply into the timeline to see if that works.
You can't lose a lawsuit because you didn't also sue someone else over copyright, which is what unlicensed games fall under. The common "you have to defend your copyright or lose it" refrain is false and actually refers to trademark only, which only refers to names of products in the marketplace (trademark).
@@OnslaughtSixI don’t think that’s what he was alluding to. To me it sounds more like “Sega knew that lack of their licensing would NOT be sufficient grounds on which to win a civil lawsuit, based on previous experience.” Also, sega didn’t use any sort of lockout system. You can literally place a ROM chip on an otherwise barren PCB and the game will boot 100% of the time with zero tomfoolery. There is NO copyright infringement concern whatsoever.
@@OnslaughtSixThe TMSS screen WAS the trademark, and Sega lost because it’s not trademark infringement to circumvent that trademark to make your game work on that system
We actually worked with Piko Interactive and Wisdom Tree to make the official sequel to the NES game "Baby Boomer" on PS4, PS5 and Epic Games! It's actually surprising you haven't found any information about this yet, but the last Wisdom Tree game to have been released is actually this year ahah!
Great content, looking forward to seeing more. FYI “Lynx” was the system “Atari” was the company. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dan’s proximity to the Tengen lawsuit helped him there.
We used to rent Bible Adventures all the time growing up. I always thought it was fun, a little tough, but back then a lot of games were pretty rough so I never thought anything of it
Its a really underrated game. I still play it today just out of the sheer fun of it. Especially the Noah storyline. Something about trying to collect the animals is really fun.
My aunt bought an NES for when my brother, our cousins and I were staying over her house. the only 3 games she ever bought for it were Galaga, Bible Adventures and Spiritual Warfare. As a game, I used to think Spiritual Warfare was pretty fun, if SUPER preachy.
If we use the Flanders example, the community in question might be delighted to have anything at all that meets their standards. Instead of speed runs, they might have endurance runs to show their dedication - that and Desert Bus.
Dan Lawton actually shifted his focus on surveillance cameras when his enthusiasm for video games waned. Color Dreams traded as StarDot Technologies since then.
Lots of ”probablys" Nintendo didnt sue because there was nothing to sue for. There is nothing illegal about unlicensed games nor selling unlicensed games. The only thing they could have sued them for was usage of Nintendo source code to get around the security features. They didn't need the source code, Nintendo knew it and thus no lawsuit. Its the same reason Sega didnt sue them.
I remember wanting to buy this game in the 90s but the only place I knew to buy it was at Funcoland and they never had it in stock. The only way I knew this game existed was because of the little newspapers Funcoland had in their stores.
The entire sage of Color Dreams & Wisdom Tree was funny to see play out back in the 8-bit and 16-bit days. I can still remember reading a piece in the summer of 1990 in Video Games & Computer Entertainment magazine about how Color Dreams was creating some sort of new chip to put in their games that would supercharge the NES with new capabilities, more colors, and so on. Then the following year the Wisdom Tree games started being released. There's one thing that's pretty much always been true of any group that a fanatical about something, there is money to be made by exploiting that fanaticism! It's especially true for religions! But you generally do have to have some level of quality about it which was a reason why Wisdom Tree didn't last longer than they did. Had they bumped up the quality a bit more and they may still be raking in decent cash today.
I have a cousin that only had Wisdom Tree games and Mario games in his collection. His mom didn't want him to play violent games. Out of those games my favorite ones were Bible Adventures and King of Kings. Noah's Ark on the first and Three Kings on the second were ones that I played and finished.
I haven't played Wisdom Tree games on original hardware, just a few of them with emulators, and they play about as well as expected. I did grow up with some Digital Praise games, mainly the _Dance Praise_ series. It's an uninspiring _DDR_ rip-off, and its poor quality led me to just play _DDR_ instead. The company's _Guitar Praise_ game and add-on packs didn't fare much better.
I have played bible buffet and bible adventures. I would give them both a C+. They didn't crash and had a decent skill lv. However, they did get repetitive after a while. Still, I had fun with them as a kid. The weird thing was you had to reset them ten times before the game would play to get past the DRM.
I get the feeling that Christian book stores didn't know much, if anything, about video games and Nintendo's licensing policy. Had they known that Dan Lawton produced those games/cartridges without proper licensing from Nintendo, and the nefarious method he used to bypass the 10NES lock-out chip, they might not have, in good faith, agreed to carry those games in their stores.
I didn’t feel the games were terrible as much as rudimentary. I played “Bible Adventures” on PC at a time (the early 90s) where kids my age were still playing Oregon Trail, Ski Free, and Lemmings, which weren’t exactly stunning graphics or nail biting gameplay, either. So the game wasn’t anything you’d beg your parents to buy for you. But, for a family using a common mid-grade home PC it didn’t feel like a large drop in quality. Perhaps the difference would be more notable if we had a higher-end PC that let us play more cutting-edge games.
I think Piko Interactive bought up the rights to some or most of the Wisdom Tree catalogue because you could buy a physical cart of Super 3D Noah's Ark -- and I did. It no longer requires you to lock on a normal SNES game to bypass Nintendo's lockout tech.
Definitely had these as a kid, only one I’ve never played was Super Noah’s Ark. Spiritual Warfare is one I still own and every so often I try to beat it. The game always crashes after 3 hours or a certain amount of progress. Anyone else have that issue? Also the fact this company went against core religious values to do this is priceless!
I had the games Spiritual Warfare and Exodus as a kid! My mom and grandma didn't mind buying us normal games but at one point in the early 90s my mom went through a deep Xtian phase. She used to shop at the local Family Xtian store and I _vividly_ remember the day we got Exodus and Spiritual Warefare. I remember seeing the TV and NES system set up in the store with the games on Demo. We got both games because they were cheap.. like 2 for the price of a normal NES game. They also only had Spiritual Warefare and Exodus in stock. I think we tried going back to see if they had other games but they never seemed to get anymore. From what I recall I think both games came with a poster for your wall.. or at least my brother had one of the Spiritual Warefare guy.... or heck maybe I am mixing up some other random God Warrior poster my mom probably brought for his room. lol. I do know one thing - I LOVED the games oddly enough!! I struggled a lot with Spiritual Warfare as it was kind of a confusing game for my kid brain. I do remember going into the Bar and losing my belt of righteousness for "falling for temptations" or whatever. lol. I mostly remember some how getting into the train track that goes around the entire map and just walking it and looking at areas I couldn't access. The game I loved tho was Exodus! It was very repetitive but I greatly enjoy repetitive tasks so it was very appealing to me. It was challenging enough while still being fun. The music though was kind of annoying after a while but I also liked it? It has become engraved into my brain at this point. lol I can still hear the tune at times playing in my head and I haven't touched the game in ages. I look back on both of those games fondly as nostalgic parts of my childhood. I'm not surprised that the original company only did it to make money. Exploiting and grifting religious people is not a new thing. 😂 That knowledge doesn't change my nostalgic enjoyment of the games either. ❤
Bible Buffet is legit a good game, it's like Candy Land where every space on the board is a two screen adventure where you collect the most food (for your church's food pantry). When the game is over, it gives out commendations to players who did things like landing on the most spaces, reaching the finish line first, etc. Just like Mario Party except a decade earlier. If you ignore the religious angle of it (or just embrace it for the kitsch) you'll have a lot of fun. It's even NES Four Score compatible, lol. Bible Buffet has become a staple of my annual charity fundraiser for Extra Life, where it always closes out the marathon as the "we just did 23 hours of video games let's do an hour of this goofy Bible game and unwind". It's always a hit.
I had Bible Adventures lol! My aunt convinced my dad to buy it for me bevause she worked st the bible store. Funny thing is, I actually liked the game, and that upset her lol! I still play ut sometimes. I don't care abiut the subject matter. I just play it because I remember playing it as a kid.
I had that game as a kid. Yes it sucks, but at the time my friends and I would play it just to laugh hysterically throwing baby Moses around. It was one of those games you would play for like 10 minutes, get bored and put in something else. I grew up in a religious house but I was allowed to play other games. It wasn't until Playstation my parents started monitoring games.
Thanks for the explanation. Wisdom Tree was obviously copying licensed titles from what I've seen of their games over the years, and I've always wondered how they got away with it, likening them to Tengen in a way.
One interesting related thing is that I have a game console called the Atari Gamestation Pro from 2023, and included on every unit are a couple Wisdom Tree games: Super 3D Noah's Ark and another version of the same game.
Raised indoctrinated by a religious fam & rapture-obsessed mom, I was only allowed religious media as a kid, and this was the game I played the most. At least until I got a SNES for Xmas by my guilty dad the year he left us for another family. Shortly after I'd had enough of staying up all night sitting on my dad's bed playing Super Mario World while he slept, I found the often derided Mystic Quest, which I was obsessed with & likely enjoyed because I had only this game to compare it to in the RPG genre...
Piko is game licensing company. Eli, the owner is a standup guy that I have worked with for years. In fact, I just finished a licensing agreement with him last month (8/24). He's purchased the rights to some or all of the Wisdom Tree titles, but was not associated with the company in any other way that I know of. While Piko does not carry a lot of really popular titles, they have started buying more mainstream IP recent years. Rage of the Dragon is one that I enjoy.
That’s debatable. I had a number of interactions with him many years ago and he was far from pleasant. He tried selling me/my business bootleg Mother 3 GBA games, entirely unsolicited. When I turned him down (his price per unit was 3-4 times that of direct from China), he got nasty with me. Again, he solicited me, and this was NOT an extended negotiation. Maybe 3-4 DMs. He also proceeded to berate repro sellers on Nintendoage for their copyright infringement the moment he moved towards licensing. Mind you, what he did up to that point was sell the very same bootleg/repro games. Truly the pot calling the kettle black. He may be a different person now, but he has quite the reputation in the industry for being less than pleasant to work/interact with.
@@wiggy8912 Like I said, my experiences have been nothing but good. But, like anything else the more feedback the better, so I still think it's great that you are sharing your experience! 👏
I had the trilogy game on the NES. Honestly, Noah's Ark was pretty fun. It's easy to judge it based on today's perception, but back in the day, it was a fun collectathon. Each level had you collecting different animals, so you'd get to level 2, see that you had to collect a sheep, and have to wrack your memory on where you saw sheep in the last level. You could only carry 3 animals at a time, and taking damage made you drop one, and sometimes they would run off. Then, in later levels, you had to collect animals that could attack you, so you had to figure out how to pacify them first. It was unique in a world of "stomp the enemy" games.
Technically under a fair use law in software copyright laws which was involved in a suit by Atari vs Activision and a major factor of the crash in 83. This was also further solidified in a lawsuit against Nintendo in which the court ruled that if reverse engineering is fair use then it's only fair for a manufacturer to make it as difficult as possible to reverse engineer. Nintendo would've lost any lawsuit against this developer since they were protected under the fair use law in the US. If they had shipped copies to certain other countries such as Japan though, it'd be a very different story.
anyone ever play exodus? I'm as atheist as they come, but my friend had that game and it was actually a lot of fun. it was on nes and was a hilariously christian game. it was an overhead grid-style 2d game like bomberman-style, but puzzle oriented
I remember being like 5 years old I was being babysat at a neighbor's house playing their NES. While looking for something to play, I found Bible Adventures. I barely remember that I tried to play it for a couple minutes then just went back to Mario.
I rented Exodus from our local video store. My sister and I both liked the game and we rented it several times. I still occasionally play it with an emulator
they made more game boy games than the two you mentioned - most if not all of the games they made for NES they also ported for game boy. i had 2 of them growing up and they actually weren't half-bad though i wouldn't be rushing out to play them again now, either.
I honestly don't think Bible Adventures is among the worst games of all time. Don't get me wrong, it's really bad. Like a 2 or 3 out of 10. But there are an awful lot of 1 out of 10 games out there.
I actually had Bible Adventures on the NES. My mom got it for me and my brother at the Christian Bookstore. I actually liked playing it at the time because I didn't have that many games. I was able to finish Noah's Ark and Baby Moses but, I could never get through David and Goliath.
I grew up in a very religious Protestant environment, but I never heard of any of these games. The AVGN review was the first time I knew anything about them. I'm actually kind of surprised because I grew up during the NES/Sega Genesis era.
In the emulation and retro-gaming communities, I've seen Piko praised a lot by the ones who are not in favour of pirating what is, by all means, abandonware. They allowed to legally acquire ROM digital copies without going through the process of buying a used cartridge and dumping it yourself, so, for example, buying a ROM from them is the only legal way to buy a digital copy of Nightshade for the NES legally. I knew they sold Wisdom Tree games, and I knew how shady Wisdom Tree was, but it never occurred to me they were related beyond Wisdom Tree selling the rights to a company that seemingly was hoarding as much IPs as possible. It's quite hilarious that these people have been portrayed as heroes and villains of the gaming industry at the same time, just by changing masks. And honestly, managing to distribute "Wolfenstein at home" for kids in evangelical households was a public service on its own.
Baby Boomer 2 is on PS5! th-cam.com/video/jZh1tWDEtgE/w-d-xo.htmlsi=_EJmkYC_lV791ZMM It's absolutely mental. Shows the Wisdom Tree logo too, so must have been licensed out? 😅
My Opinion on why Nintendo didn't Sued "Wisdom Tree," was because they didn't want to get Strike down by Lighting from the Man Up Stairs, and get sent to Heck🔥 ps: Noah Ark is a Funny game😂😂😂
never played this but I did have to literally sneak my copy of bad dudes on nes to the neighbor kid cuz his parents wouldn’t let him play anything with “violence” 😂
"Nintendo isn't going to try to sue God"..(cue the pixel art shades and cig sliding onto the face of Wisdom Tree's CEO). I would feel big and bad too if I outsmarted a huge multi national Disney-esque company that has an endless army of top lawyers.
I seem to recall one of the unlicensed developers, not sure if it was them, that used a pass through cartridge, like the game genie was. This allowed the nes to see the counterpart chip in a genuine game, and allow their game to run instead.
I played Bible Adventures. I don't even remember where from. Maybe Blockbuster or borrowed from a friend? It was such an oddity, and really a pretty terrible game. It was like playing Luigi in SMB2 the whole time, kind of accelerated bad and you couldn't do anything precise. Thankfully my family went the PC route, and my parents didn't balk at Wolfenstein or Doom (hey, still eliminating evil things right?!). I knew it was one of those weird unlicensed games, but had no idea of the history behind it. Cool story!
While selling borderline shovelware to kids unlucky enough to be from puritanical families is hard to applaud (though as some have pointed out, this may well have been the only access to video games said kids to hope to get), the sheer schadenfreude of a tiny indie company finding a way to royally shaft Nintendo during their years of 8-bit tyranny is just too delightful.
I can say in my case, Wisdom Tree had no influence on my childhood whatsoever. My parents were quite religious, but my mom was a videogamer from the inception of the medium (loving Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac-Man in arcades, Super Mario Bros. 3, Dr. Mario, and Tetris on the NES, Bomberman 64 on the Nintendo 64, and both Animal Crossing: City Folk and New Horizons on their respective platforms). My dad was a fantasy nerd (his nickname was "Hobbit" when he was younger and that sent him down a rabbit hole...or Hobbit hole as it were), and his reasons for forbidding us from playing Dungeons & Dragons weren't tied to the Satanic Panic, but observations that his other fantasy nerd friends would get less creative and try to shoehorn other fantasy stories into D&D's mechanics and disagreeing with the amoral murder hobo premise of the campaign they were playing when he asked what the _game_ was about. If they'd emphasized lich lords, dragons, and devils as the Bad Guys and paladins and clerics as the Good Guys instead of thieves as the Good Guys and wizards innocently not wanting their towers robbed as the Bad Guys, my childhood could have been very different. As a rebellious teenager, played "I'm not touching you" with D&D by reading the rulebooks but not playing by them, and making up our own d20 driven systems vaguely based on D&D and videogame RPGs like Castle of the Winds and Dragon Quest with my cousins and brothers. Yeah, other kids got into alcohol and tobacco and porn in their teens; I got into not playing D&D on a technicality. (Porn came later.) When I was older and a game developer myself, I ran into a lot of friction in the small indie game dev circles I ran due to my _genuinely held_ religious beliefs and softball center-right politics (as of 2003). I was ridiculed to the point that multiple games had NPCs placed in them specifically to mock me for being Christian, conservative, or a furry in various combinations. (Porn came around this time, being pushed by the less than Christian furries of said community, including being included in games; my objections to this were part of what made me a pariah but my not immediately fleeing is one of the main things that got me hooked.) A while after AVGN's video about the Bible games people started coming around to Spiritual Warfare in particular as a good game, actually; basically if you want another game that plays like the original Zelda and isn't Zelda, here's a new game for you and it's of acceptable baseline industry quality. It was in my late 20s that Wisdom Tree started to influence me, with a wise tree NPC dispensing advice to one hero already I leaned into it a bit. I'm getting more aggressive and radical, both politically and religiously, in response to decades of sustained emotional and reputational abuse. I'm embracing the crusade.
...Being a "Normal" Person isn't "radical": The Far-Left are the "radicals", imo. ...And don't let those Psychopaths effect your Emotional state: ...They actually "get off" on that... Yeah, they're very sick, disturbed, & toxic "people".
I grew up in Brooklyn New York and religion was never pushed on my friends in any way here as it is a liberal city. that being said, I never even saw these games till AVGN covered them. I also was a Nintendo fanboy/sheeple who saw anything unlicensed as sacrilegious as Nintendo was indeed my religion as a child...these games look fun for a kid and I would definitely would have enjoyed them I am sure. come to think of it, other controversial games such as NORTH AND SOUTH and golgo 13 abound on the nes WITH licensing! tengen also made amazing games. I LOVED super sprint, shinobi (it was just ok but I was dying for a home port and now I have the arcade game on my nintendo switch), and Tetris (far superior to the nes version), along with alien syndrome the arcade hit. I don't remember if outrun was available through them but I was a huge arcade fan, not a console kid. the one game I wish nes had or even super nes was DOUBLE DRAGON, the monster arcade hit from 1987. it came to the genesis in somewhat butchered form with an awful sound chip. I was also a super nes fanboy. wish I gave genesis a try as I really really loved strider in the arcade as well as altered beast
To be honest I only know Wisdom Tree due to the Angry Videogame Nerd and thanks to that I played Super 3D Noah's Ark in an emulator and it wasn't that bad. Also at 12:58 Not sure if you know it but Piko Interactive along with Wisdom Tree just released like some weeks ago a new game that was developed by an indie developer called Kimulator Films Inc. which was a sequel of the game Baby Boomer for PC, PS4 and PS5, it's called: Baby Boomer 2: 35 Years Too Soon. Yeah, no idea why a new game or a comeback nowdays but hey, 2024 has been a very weird year. 😂
Not all the Wisdom Tree games are really that awful. I played some as a kid. They're... alright. I wouldn't call them particularly awesome but there were worse ways to spend your free time back then. And, sure, your parents let you play them, maybe even a bit longer, because they're religious. So, it wasn't all bad. Plus, it's fun to toss baby Moses around like a rag doll and intentionally abuse him.
Ah man, Bible Adventures was legendarily bad even in the early 90s, and I was like 6 when I first played it. I dont even know how we ended up getting a copy, as it's not like I was forbidden from playing normal games, and I had gems like Final Fantasy and Blaster Master on hand. A few of my cousins were raised fairly sheltered until their late teens though, and the oldest is less than a year younger than I am, so it was really annoying whenever I went there as a child, as everything he was allowed to do was either extremely child friendly, or Bible based. These were literally some of the only video games he was allowed to own as a child, which is really sad thinking about it because more than a few of my other cousins and I would kinda exclude him from a lot of things growing up. He was definitely one of the ones who basically could only play video games that were educational or Bible centric as a kid though, so they definitely existed.
Imagine 😅 it’s a cold winter in 1992, The house at the lake is halfway finished you just got electricity and have a bedroom now, And your parents let you borrow the black and white TV. There’s still no carpet on the floors and the walls are still plywood, and the only heat ( a Kerosene heater in the living room)… Well, as one of those kids that had bible adventures , I guess the question is when your bar is Set-low what is bad? Because I actually enjoy the monotony of trying to collect all those stupid animals for Noah’s ark!
We used to rent Christian video games and I loved to play spiritual warfare it was one of those so bad it's good type of things. I'll never forget that after you collected all of the spiritual armor that the main bad guy was The Devil and so you were fighting The Devil and I remember the overworld music for the whole game never really changed so you still had the generic overworld music from the map and you were fighting the devil; no main boss music or anything 😂 felt rather unceremonious
"In an interview Lawton called Lynx 'helpful'" IMO if Atari wasn't so desperate for money at the time, they probably would've said "F*ck off" to Lawton.
While I never played the bible games willingly, I did play them at other houses I went to visit. I do remember them being cheap at the thrift store once the NES was being phased out--something I absolutely do laugh about when I see the prices of them online by collectors. Same with all of the other stupid 'failures' that I and everyone else threw out.
I kind of wonder if Christian video games would be a good target demographic for my own pursuits. Not in a disingenuous way, mind you, but as a newbie outsider who's learning the Full-Frontal Holy Bible. A "Song of Songs" game would be rated AO for sure, but I'm more interested in the less scandalous stuff.
Wisdom Tree did one thing good, provide games for kids that may have been not allowed to play games otherwise. Growing up I absolutely knew kids who only had these games.
Same here, and I cannot find it in me to feel like their parents were being "exploited". If anything, the existence of these games made it easier for their children to understand how stifling their parents were, and later escape that environment and go on to live happy and fulfilling lives.
Ugh, the bad thing about the 90's was so many religious fanatical parents that destroyed our toys. They were the stupid unstable lunatics and they blamed us and our toys/games for their own inner demons.
I couldn't imagine being socially isolated like that growing up. My dad was very religious and yet even he didn't do that. This type of isolation was a major premise in the movie "Carrie" , and people might think that the mother was just some super extreme example cooked up by Hollywood writers trying to be as dramatic as they could. However, a lot of kids in the real world went through stuff like that, and were ostracized by their peers in school. And then there were kids who went through MUCH worse. 😱
@@plateshutoverlock Yeah, these religious narcissist parents do exist and they have ruined the lives of millions while they get away with it.
Yeah, but at what cost? There's no telling what effect these videogames had on their developing minds. Clearly should've been banned.
Wisdom Tree made at least one other Game Boy game, that being Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, which I got with the manual. It sadly only works on the original Game Boy and Game Boy pocket, as it requires the Nintendo logo boot up to run properly. I even called Wisdom Tree that day (in 1999) to ask about some notes in the manual explaining how to run the game in the PC and Genesis, and possibly the NES, but got their answering machine, and I thought I heard a different company's name, so I hang up. They called me back later to see what I had called about, and when I basically reiterated everything I said here, before aswerinf the question, the lady who called me back asked what game I had found. When I said it was Joshua, she called me a fortunate soul and said that was one they couldn't get anymore, the others being Spiritual Warfare and Exodus. The lady then explained to me that the game is in fact not playable on anything but the Game Boy, but that they wrote the manual to contain the instructions for all platforms they released it for, as sort of a one size fits all, which made sense. She then offered to send me a catalog of the games they still offered, and I took her up on it. I never bought anything from it, but it was very cool to have that conversation, and to learn that they were still in business.
Brings me back to the Bible Games trilogy of AVGN.
Sheepie, sheepie...
𝓢𝓱𝓮𝓮𝓹𝓲𝓮, 𝓼𝓱𝓮𝓮𝓹𝓲𝓮, 𝓼𝓱𝓮𝓮𝓹𝓲𝓮!
"You just winged him and made him a Unitarian." Probably one of the funniest lines the show ever had.
Anyway...
Nintendo cash-grab = good; pretty ingeniously getting around Nintendo's iron fist = bad? Nothing was stolen. Nothing was destroyed. Nintendo probably made more money in the end because more people bought the NES for these games and then started buying official NES games.
There’s no question that they used the voltage spike method. The games even have instructions about waiting through X number of flashes.
Thank you!
@@AlmostSomething In the manual it actually talked about the voltage spike method requiring ten resets to work.
Both stories are correct. Early releases used the voltage method, but later ones and reprints were using reverse engineered chips, though in case of re-releases manual stayed the same. The only way to know if you have later version with reverse engineered chip is to either open it up or launch and see if it is starting instantly.
@@UltimatePerfection I got Bible Adventures and King of Kings from “The Ark: Christian Book Store” and rented Spiritual Warfare from them enough times to finish it but never noticed flashing other than the usual difficulties getting any NES game to work… however my current copies (also from the early ‘90s) definitely use the charge and shock method. I assumed I just didn’t notice when I was a kid and it would zap the chip while I was still jiggling and resetting manually but two different methods over time might also explain it. That said, of course the modern copies use a clone CIC key… but were they ever using one during the console’s retail life? I’m still not sure, but I know they used the shock method since that’s how the ones I still have work. :)
The video seems to imply that they updated the carts to work with revisions like the NES-101 “toploader” when, in fact, that was the one that would have just worked regardless. It was later versions of the original NES-001 “frontloader” that had revisions to protect the CIC lock from the shock attack.
Hot take - Spiritual Warfare was an obvious LOZ copycat -- but not a really poorly done copycat. The world was huge with a lot to explore, sprites were simple, but responsiveness and hit detection, enemy 'ai' all were acceptable. The Bible themes were incorporated in a way that did not come off as disingenuous or exploitative. It was a pretty fun and rewarding game and I think is a solidly mid NES game - far more playable and fun than much of the lower tier fare like say LJN's X-Men.
Yeah, I'd agree with this. It's decent. In a world full of Zeldalikes, there's no particular reason to play it specifically, but it was a good-enough game. Probably the best thing Wisdom Tree put out, at least from what I've seen.
I agree too. I actually like to play Spiritual Warfare sometimes still. For its time, it is a perfectly decent Zeldalike.
I rented it a few times and beat Spiritual Warfare back when I still thought Zelda was just a game with randomly spawning enemies and no goal/point. It blew me away. Imagine my surprise when I found out Zelda was the real thing.
Yeah, Spiritual Warfare is easily the best Wisdom Tree game.
Preach it brother!
This was definitely a refreshing take on the topic of Wisdom Tree and their infamous bible games! Usually the focus is on the quality of the games themselves, rather than the surprisingly interesting history behind them. Excellent work!
Made my day! Thanks so much.
Their game, "Spiritual Warfare", was a genuinely good game. Different enough from other top-down games like Legend of Zelda, it was large, challenging, fun, and creative. Can't really say that about anything else they made, but that game was a genuine one-hit wonder.
Agreed!
Just to toss in, Sega not suing Wisdom Tree may have also been connected to them losing a lawsuit against Accolade over unlicensed games, although I haven't looked deeply into the timeline to see if that works.
Good point and same. That's one that I gotta get to at some point.
You can't lose a lawsuit because you didn't also sue someone else over copyright, which is what unlicensed games fall under. The common "you have to defend your copyright or lose it" refrain is false and actually refers to trademark only, which only refers to names of products in the marketplace (trademark).
@@OnslaughtSixI don’t think that’s what he was alluding to. To me it sounds more like “Sega knew that lack of their licensing would NOT be sufficient grounds on which to win a civil lawsuit, based on previous experience.”
Also, sega didn’t use any sort of lockout system. You can literally place a ROM chip on an otherwise barren PCB and the game will boot 100% of the time with zero tomfoolery. There is NO copyright infringement concern whatsoever.
@@OnslaughtSixThe TMSS screen WAS the trademark, and Sega lost because it’s not trademark infringement to circumvent that trademark to make your game work on that system
We actually worked with Piko Interactive and Wisdom Tree to make the official sequel to the NES game "Baby Boomer" on PS4, PS5 and Epic Games!
It's actually surprising you haven't found any information about this yet, but the last Wisdom Tree game to have been released is actually this year ahah!
Great content, looking forward to seeing more. FYI “Lynx” was the system “Atari” was the company. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dan’s proximity to the Tengen lawsuit helped him there.
We used to rent Bible Adventures all the time growing up. I always thought it was fun, a little tough, but back then a lot of games were pretty rough so I never thought anything of it
Its a really underrated game. I still play it today just out of the sheer fun of it. Especially the Noah storyline. Something about trying to collect the animals is really fun.
Did you know they made a sequel to baby boomer? It released last month
My aunt bought an NES for when my brother, our cousins and I were staying over her house. the only 3 games she ever bought for it were Galaga, Bible Adventures and Spiritual Warfare. As a game, I used to think Spiritual Warfare was pretty fun, if SUPER preachy.
If we use the Flanders example, the community in question might be delighted to have anything at all that meets their standards. Instead of speed runs, they might have endurance runs to show their dedication - that and Desert Bus.
Dan Lawton actually shifted his focus on surveillance cameras when his enthusiasm for video games waned. Color Dreams traded as StarDot Technologies since then.
Bought this at a local Christian bookstore back in the day ... That's where we'd get all those old Archie comics printed by Spire as well!
Lots of ”probablys"
Nintendo didnt sue because there was nothing to sue for. There is nothing illegal about unlicensed games nor selling unlicensed games. The only thing they could have sued them for was usage of Nintendo source code to get around the security features. They didn't need the source code, Nintendo knew it and thus no lawsuit. Its the same reason Sega didnt sue them.
8:23 They don't seem to have an issue suing unreasonable amounts of small fry now.
Our family loved playing Joshua and the Sega Genesis. Yeah it might have not been the greatest game, but we had a lot of fun doing it
I remember wanting to buy this game in the 90s but the only place I knew to buy it was at Funcoland and they never had it in stock. The only way I knew this game existed was because of the little newspapers Funcoland had in their stores.
Funcoland - good times!
Almost Something, great content keep up the amazing work
Made my day! Thanks man.
fun(?) fact: Kimulator's films actually got the rights to Baby Boomer and made a sequel this year!
The entire sage of Color Dreams & Wisdom Tree was funny to see play out back in the 8-bit and 16-bit days. I can still remember reading a piece in the summer of 1990 in Video Games & Computer Entertainment magazine about how Color Dreams was creating some sort of new chip to put in their games that would supercharge the NES with new capabilities, more colors, and so on. Then the following year the Wisdom Tree games started being released.
There's one thing that's pretty much always been true of any group that a fanatical about something, there is money to be made by exploiting that fanaticism! It's especially true for religions! But you generally do have to have some level of quality about it which was a reason why Wisdom Tree didn't last longer than they did. Had they bumped up the quality a bit more and they may still be raking in decent cash today.
I have a cousin that only had Wisdom Tree games and Mario games in his collection. His mom didn't want him to play violent games. Out of those games my favorite ones were Bible Adventures and King of Kings. Noah's Ark on the first and Three Kings on the second were ones that I played and finished.
I haven't played Wisdom Tree games on original hardware, just a few of them with emulators, and they play about as well as expected. I did grow up with some Digital Praise games, mainly the _Dance Praise_ series. It's an uninspiring _DDR_ rip-off, and its poor quality led me to just play _DDR_ instead. The company's _Guitar Praise_ game and add-on packs didn't fare much better.
I have played bible buffet and bible adventures. I would give them both a C+. They didn't crash and had a decent skill lv. However, they did get repetitive after a while. Still, I had fun with them as a kid. The weird thing was you had to reset them ten times before the game would play to get past the DRM.
I get the feeling that Christian book stores didn't know much, if anything, about video games and Nintendo's licensing policy. Had they known that Dan Lawton produced those games/cartridges without proper licensing from Nintendo, and the nefarious method he used to bypass the 10NES lock-out chip, they might not have, in good faith, agreed to carry those games in their stores.
I also genuinely wonder how they would have felt if they'd known that Wisdom Tree was just in it for the $$, rather than caring about faith at all.
I didn’t feel the games were terrible as much as rudimentary. I played “Bible Adventures” on PC at a time (the early 90s) where kids my age were still playing Oregon Trail, Ski Free, and Lemmings, which weren’t exactly stunning graphics or nail biting gameplay, either.
So the game wasn’t anything you’d beg your parents to buy for you. But, for a family using a common mid-grade home PC it didn’t feel like a large drop in quality. Perhaps the difference would be more notable if we had a higher-end PC that let us play more cutting-edge games.
I think Piko Interactive bought up the rights to some or most of the Wisdom Tree catalogue because you could buy a physical cart of Super 3D Noah's Ark -- and I did. It no longer requires you to lock on a normal SNES game to bypass Nintendo's lockout tech.
Definitely had these as a kid, only one I’ve never played was Super Noah’s Ark. Spiritual Warfare is one I still own and every so often I try to beat it. The game always crashes after 3 hours or a certain amount of progress. Anyone else have that issue? Also the fact this company went against core religious values to do this is priceless!
You showed a SNES PCB when you where talking about the NES lockout chip, and Lynx isn't a company. The Lynx was a portable game made by Atari.
I had the games Spiritual Warfare and Exodus as a kid! My mom and grandma didn't mind buying us normal games but at one point in the early 90s my mom went through a deep Xtian phase. She used to shop at the local Family Xtian store and I _vividly_ remember the day we got Exodus and Spiritual Warefare. I remember seeing the TV and NES system set up in the store with the games on Demo. We got both games because they were cheap.. like 2 for the price of a normal NES game. They also only had Spiritual Warefare and Exodus in stock. I think we tried going back to see if they had other games but they never seemed to get anymore. From what I recall I think both games came with a poster for your wall.. or at least my brother had one of the Spiritual Warefare guy.... or heck maybe I am mixing up some other random God Warrior poster my mom probably brought for his room. lol.
I do know one thing - I LOVED the games oddly enough!!
I struggled a lot with Spiritual Warfare as it was kind of a confusing game for my kid brain. I do remember going into the Bar and losing my belt of righteousness for "falling for temptations" or whatever. lol. I mostly remember some how getting into the train track that goes around the entire map and just walking it and looking at areas I couldn't access. The game I loved tho was Exodus! It was very repetitive but I greatly enjoy repetitive tasks so it was very appealing to me. It was challenging enough while still being fun. The music though was kind of annoying after a while but I also liked it? It has become engraved into my brain at this point. lol I can still hear the tune at times playing in my head and I haven't touched the game in ages.
I look back on both of those games fondly as nostalgic parts of my childhood. I'm not surprised that the original company only did it to make money. Exploiting and grifting religious people is not a new thing. 😂 That knowledge doesn't change my nostalgic enjoyment of the games either. ❤
Why is it ridiculous to have Christian video games?
Bible Buffet is legit a good game, it's like Candy Land where every space on the board is a two screen adventure where you collect the most food (for your church's food pantry). When the game is over, it gives out commendations to players who did things like landing on the most spaces, reaching the finish line first, etc. Just like Mario Party except a decade earlier. If you ignore the religious angle of it (or just embrace it for the kitsch) you'll have a lot of fun. It's even NES Four Score compatible, lol.
Bible Buffet has become a staple of my annual charity fundraiser for Extra Life, where it always closes out the marathon as the "we just did 23 hours of video games let's do an hour of this goofy Bible game and unwind". It's always a hit.
I had Bible Adventures lol! My aunt convinced my dad to buy it for me bevause she worked st the bible store.
Funny thing is, I actually liked the game, and that upset her lol!
I still play ut sometimes. I don't care abiut the subject matter. I just play it because I remember playing it as a kid.
I had that game as a kid. Yes it sucks, but at the time my friends and I would play it just to laugh hysterically throwing baby Moses around. It was one of those games you would play for like 10 minutes, get bored and put in something else. I grew up in a religious house but I was allowed to play other games. It wasn't until Playstation my parents started monitoring games.
Thanks for the explanation. Wisdom Tree was obviously copying licensed titles from what I've seen of their games over the years, and I've always wondered how they got away with it, likening them to Tengen in a way.
I discovered your channel by my accident and now you're one of my go-to's for daily content.
Keep up the good work!
Nice! Thanks so much.
13:50 I only just recently found both this and Pojr's channel, and I'm glad that I did
Name me one modern game studio that's less cash grabby. Maybe there is one, I don't know.
Would love a Christian mmo. Just have no confidence anyone could do it well.
"POJR" is pronounced "poe-jur."
Thank you!
One interesting related thing is that I have a game console called the Atari Gamestation Pro from 2023, and included on every unit are a couple Wisdom Tree games: Super 3D Noah's Ark and another version of the same game.
Raised indoctrinated by a religious fam & rapture-obsessed mom, I was only allowed religious media as a kid, and this was the game I played the most. At least until I got a SNES for Xmas by my guilty dad the year he left us for another family. Shortly after I'd had enough of staying up all night sitting on my dad's bed playing Super Mario World while he slept, I found the often derided Mystic Quest, which I was obsessed with & likely enjoyed because I had only this game to compare it to in the RPG genre...
Piko is game licensing company. Eli, the owner is a standup guy that I have worked with for years. In fact, I just finished a licensing agreement with him last month (8/24). He's purchased the rights to some or all of the Wisdom Tree titles, but was not associated with the company in any other way that I know of.
While Piko does not carry a lot of really popular titles, they have started buying more mainstream IP recent years. Rage of the Dragon is one that I enjoy.
That’s debatable. I had a number of interactions with him many years ago and he was far from pleasant. He tried selling me/my business bootleg Mother 3 GBA games, entirely unsolicited. When I turned him down (his price per unit was 3-4 times that of direct from China), he got nasty with me. Again, he solicited me, and this was NOT an extended negotiation. Maybe 3-4 DMs.
He also proceeded to berate repro sellers on Nintendoage for their copyright infringement the moment he moved towards licensing. Mind you, what he did up to that point was sell the very same bootleg/repro games. Truly the pot calling the kettle black.
He may be a different person now, but he has quite the reputation in the industry for being less than pleasant to work/interact with.
@@wiggy8912 Like I said, my experiences have been nothing but good. But, like anything else the more feedback the better, so I still think it's great that you are sharing your experience! 👏
I had the trilogy game on the NES. Honestly, Noah's Ark was pretty fun. It's easy to judge it based on today's perception, but back in the day, it was a fun collectathon. Each level had you collecting different animals, so you'd get to level 2, see that you had to collect a sheep, and have to wrack your memory on where you saw sheep in the last level. You could only carry 3 animals at a time, and taking damage made you drop one, and sometimes they would run off. Then, in later levels, you had to collect animals that could attack you, so you had to figure out how to pacify them first. It was unique in a world of "stomp the enemy" games.
*Praying for you!*
Technically under a fair use law in software copyright laws which was involved in a suit by Atari vs Activision and a major factor of the crash in 83. This was also further solidified in a lawsuit against Nintendo in which the court ruled that if reverse engineering is fair use then it's only fair for a manufacturer to make it as difficult as possible to reverse engineer. Nintendo would've lost any lawsuit against this developer since they were protected under the fair use law in the US. If they had shipped copies to certain other countries such as Japan though, it'd be a very different story.
Great job aw always!!! :)
Thank you!!!
Perhaps they didn't sue the Christian book stores because they didn't have a retail contract with them.
anyone ever play exodus? I'm as atheist as they come, but my friend had that game and it was actually a lot of fun. it was on nes and was a hilariously christian game. it was an overhead grid-style 2d game like bomberman-style, but puzzle oriented
A Hellraiser game in the Wolfenstein 3d engine would've been really interesting. Like Doom Lite?
Bionic Commando / SMB2 / 1943 / Jaws fan, here. Bible Adventures was actually a fun game.
The "G" in Tengen is pronounced like the "G" in "God".
I remember being like 5 years old I was being babysat at a neighbor's house playing their NES. While looking for something to play, I found Bible Adventures. I barely remember that I tried to play it for a couple minutes then just went back to Mario.
I rented Exodus from our local video store. My sister and I both liked the game and we rented it several times. I still occasionally play it with an emulator
Funny thing is I remember someone had King of Kings, I borrowed it and loved it.
they made more game boy games than the two you mentioned - most if not all of the games they made for NES they also ported for game boy. i had 2 of them growing up and they actually weren't half-bad though i wouldn't be rushing out to play them again now, either.
I honestly don't think Bible Adventures is among the worst games of all time. Don't get me wrong, it's really bad. Like a 2 or 3 out of 10. But there are an awful lot of 1 out of 10 games out there.
I actually had Bible Adventures on the NES. My mom got it for me and my brother at the Christian Bookstore. I actually liked playing it at the time because I didn't have that many games. I was able to finish Noah's Ark and Baby Moses but, I could never get through David and Goliath.
Your being a little harsh on these games. I think they look fine for nes games. Maybe not the color dream games .
I grew up in a very religious Protestant environment, but I never heard of any of these games. The AVGN review was the first time I knew anything about them. I'm actually kind of surprised because I grew up during the NES/Sega Genesis era.
In the emulation and retro-gaming communities, I've seen Piko praised a lot by the ones who are not in favour of pirating what is, by all means, abandonware. They allowed to legally acquire ROM digital copies without going through the process of buying a used cartridge and dumping it yourself, so, for example, buying a ROM from them is the only legal way to buy a digital copy of Nightshade for the NES legally. I knew they sold Wisdom Tree games, and I knew how shady Wisdom Tree was, but it never occurred to me they were related beyond Wisdom Tree selling the rights to a company that seemingly was hoarding as much IPs as possible.
It's quite hilarious that these people have been portrayed as heroes and villains of the gaming industry at the same time, just by changing masks. And honestly, managing to distribute "Wolfenstein at home" for kids in evangelical households was a public service on its own.
Baby Boomer 2 is on PS5! th-cam.com/video/jZh1tWDEtgE/w-d-xo.htmlsi=_EJmkYC_lV791ZMM
It's absolutely mental. Shows the Wisdom Tree logo too, so must have been licensed out? 😅
We did indeed work with Wisdom Tree and Piko Interactive to make the sequel to Baby Boomer!
My Opinion on why Nintendo didn't Sued "Wisdom Tree," was because they didn't want to get Strike down by Lighting from the Man Up Stairs, and get sent to Heck🔥 ps: Noah Ark is a Funny game😂😂😂
@2:42 I'm sure you meant retailers not realtors heh
No cause I was talking about people buying houses…
……..damnit. I’m so dumb LOL
never played this but I did have to literally sneak my copy of bad dudes on nes to the neighbor kid cuz his parents wouldn’t let him play anything with “violence” 😂
"Nintendo isn't going to try to sue God"..(cue the pixel art shades and cig sliding onto the face of Wisdom Tree's CEO).
I would feel big and bad too if I outsmarted a huge multi national Disney-esque company that has an endless army of top lawyers.
I remember playing Color Dreams bizzaro arcade ports, the Bible ones and some breaking and entering burglar one
i remember seeing games like this at christian book stores. My mother visited them alot as a child
My cousin's had bible adventures and I played the heck out of it when we visited them. Those blue cartridges were special lol
8:45 This happened in an Ally McBeal episode I believe.
Pojr (Poh jerr) Im subbed to him too and he says it at the start of all his videos "whats up guys, its Pojr"
I swear I listened and didn’t hear. I’m probably just an idiot LOL. thanks!
@@AlmostSomething he doesnt intro himself untill a couple minutes in sometimes so if you are skipping around it can be easy to miss lol
I seem to recall one of the unlicensed developers, not sure if it was them, that used a pass through cartridge, like the game genie was. This allowed the nes to see the counterpart chip in a genuine game, and allow their game to run instead.
Crystal Mines was a VERY good game from this publisher. Highly playable and none of the usual glitches .
I play it to this day
I remember seeing those ads.
I played Bible Adventures. I don't even remember where from. Maybe Blockbuster or borrowed from a friend? It was such an oddity, and really a pretty terrible game. It was like playing Luigi in SMB2 the whole time, kind of accelerated bad and you couldn't do anything precise. Thankfully my family went the PC route, and my parents didn't balk at Wolfenstein or Doom (hey, still eliminating evil things right?!). I knew it was one of those weird unlicensed games, but had no idea of the history behind it. Cool story!
While selling borderline shovelware to kids unlucky enough to be from puritanical families is hard to applaud (though as some have pointed out, this may well have been the only access to video games said kids to hope to get), the sheer schadenfreude of a tiny indie company finding a way to royally shaft Nintendo during their years of 8-bit tyranny is just too delightful.
I can say in my case, Wisdom Tree had no influence on my childhood whatsoever. My parents were quite religious, but my mom was a videogamer from the inception of the medium (loving Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac-Man in arcades, Super Mario Bros. 3, Dr. Mario, and Tetris on the NES, Bomberman 64 on the Nintendo 64, and both Animal Crossing: City Folk and New Horizons on their respective platforms). My dad was a fantasy nerd (his nickname was "Hobbit" when he was younger and that sent him down a rabbit hole...or Hobbit hole as it were), and his reasons for forbidding us from playing Dungeons & Dragons weren't tied to the Satanic Panic, but observations that his other fantasy nerd friends would get less creative and try to shoehorn other fantasy stories into D&D's mechanics and disagreeing with the amoral murder hobo premise of the campaign they were playing when he asked what the _game_ was about. If they'd emphasized lich lords, dragons, and devils as the Bad Guys and paladins and clerics as the Good Guys instead of thieves as the Good Guys and wizards innocently not wanting their towers robbed as the Bad Guys, my childhood could have been very different.
As a rebellious teenager, played "I'm not touching you" with D&D by reading the rulebooks but not playing by them, and making up our own d20 driven systems vaguely based on D&D and videogame RPGs like Castle of the Winds and Dragon Quest with my cousins and brothers. Yeah, other kids got into alcohol and tobacco and porn in their teens; I got into not playing D&D on a technicality. (Porn came later.)
When I was older and a game developer myself, I ran into a lot of friction in the small indie game dev circles I ran due to my _genuinely held_ religious beliefs and softball center-right politics (as of 2003). I was ridiculed to the point that multiple games had NPCs placed in them specifically to mock me for being Christian, conservative, or a furry in various combinations. (Porn came around this time, being pushed by the less than Christian furries of said community, including being included in games; my objections to this were part of what made me a pariah but my not immediately fleeing is one of the main things that got me hooked.)
A while after AVGN's video about the Bible games people started coming around to Spiritual Warfare in particular as a good game, actually; basically if you want another game that plays like the original Zelda and isn't Zelda, here's a new game for you and it's of acceptable baseline industry quality. It was in my late 20s that Wisdom Tree started to influence me, with a wise tree NPC dispensing advice to one hero already I leaned into it a bit. I'm getting more aggressive and radical, both politically and religiously, in response to decades of sustained emotional and reputational abuse. I'm embracing the crusade.
...Being a "Normal" Person isn't "radical": The Far-Left are the "radicals", imo.
...And don't let those Psychopaths effect your Emotional state:
...They actually "get off" on that... Yeah, they're very sick, disturbed, & toxic "people".
So you're proving those people right. That'll show 'em!
I grew up in Brooklyn New York and religion was never pushed on my friends in any way here as it is a liberal city. that being said, I never even saw these games till AVGN covered them. I also was a Nintendo fanboy/sheeple who saw anything unlicensed as sacrilegious as Nintendo was indeed my religion as a child...these games look fun for a kid and I would definitely would have enjoyed them I am sure. come to think of it, other controversial games such as NORTH AND SOUTH and golgo 13 abound on the nes WITH licensing! tengen also made amazing games. I LOVED super sprint, shinobi (it was just ok but I was dying for a home port and now I have the arcade game on my nintendo switch), and Tetris (far superior to the nes version), along with alien syndrome the arcade hit. I don't remember if outrun was available through them but I was a huge arcade fan, not a console kid. the one game I wish nes had or even super nes was DOUBLE DRAGON, the monster arcade hit from 1987. it came to the genesis in somewhat butchered form with an awful sound chip. I was also a super nes fanboy. wish I gave genesis a try as I really really loved strider in the arcade as well as altered beast
To be honest I only know Wisdom Tree due to the Angry Videogame Nerd and thanks to that I played Super 3D Noah's Ark in an emulator and it wasn't that bad.
Also at 12:58
Not sure if you know it but Piko Interactive along with Wisdom Tree just released like some weeks ago a new game that was developed by an indie developer called Kimulator Films Inc. which was a sequel of the game Baby Boomer for PC, PS4 and PS5, it's called: Baby Boomer 2: 35 Years Too Soon.
Yeah, no idea why a new game or a comeback nowdays but hey, 2024 has been a very weird year. 😂
Not all the Wisdom Tree games are really that awful. I played some as a kid. They're... alright. I wouldn't call them particularly awesome but there were worse ways to spend your free time back then. And, sure, your parents let you play them, maybe even a bit longer, because they're religious. So, it wasn't all bad. Plus, it's fun to toss baby Moses around like a rag doll and intentionally abuse him.
Piko actually released an anime in addition to a game a few years ago, Boku no Piko.
Never watched or played, but I hear it's quite controversial.
Ah man, Bible Adventures was legendarily bad even in the early 90s, and I was like 6 when I first played it.
I dont even know how we ended up getting a copy, as it's not like I was forbidden from playing normal games, and I had gems like Final Fantasy and Blaster Master on hand.
A few of my cousins were raised fairly sheltered until their late teens though, and the oldest is less than a year younger than I am, so it was really annoying whenever I went there as a child, as everything he was allowed to do was either extremely child friendly, or Bible based. These were literally some of the only video games he was allowed to own as a child, which is really sad thinking about it because more than a few of my other cousins and I would kinda exclude him from a lot of things growing up.
He was definitely one of the ones who basically could only play video games that were educational or Bible centric as a kid though, so they definitely existed.
Wisdom Tree also ported Exodus, Joshua and Spiritual Warfare to the Gameboy as well.
Wow I could have swore I was the only one that played those games
Yes, Jesus in Space is a rather silly title. They really should have gone with Jesus of NASAreth.
....Fuels cynicism about capitalism. lol Great video.
I struggle to see how they did anything wrong. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
They didn't. They found a way to take on a conglomerate.
Spiritual Warfare also got a Gameboy release.
Imagine
😅 it’s a cold winter in 1992,
The house at the lake is halfway finished you just got electricity and have a bedroom now, And your parents let you borrow the black and white TV. There’s still no carpet on the floors and the walls are still plywood, and the only heat ( a Kerosene heater in the living room)… Well, as one of those kids that had bible adventures , I guess the question is when your bar is Set-low what is bad? Because I actually enjoy the monotony of trying to collect all those stupid animals for Noah’s ark!
We used to rent Christian video games and I loved to play spiritual warfare it was one of those so bad it's good type of things. I'll never forget that after you collected all of the spiritual armor that the main bad guy was The Devil and so you were fighting The Devil and I remember the overworld music for the whole game never really changed so you still had the generic overworld music from the map and you were fighting the devil; no main boss music or anything 😂 felt rather unceremonious
"In an interview Lawton called Lynx 'helpful'" IMO if Atari wasn't so desperate for money at the time, they probably would've said "F*ck off" to Lawton.
Actually Noah's ark and hellraisr would have been fps that showed the the company igrasp on biblical understanding.
@1:20 That's a Super Nintendo.
While I never played the bible games willingly, I did play them at other houses I went to visit. I do remember them being cheap at the thrift store once the NES was being phased out--something I absolutely do laugh about when I see the prices of them online by collectors. Same with all of the other stupid 'failures' that I and everyone else threw out.
I kind of wonder if Christian video games would be a good target demographic for my own pursuits. Not in a disingenuous way, mind you, but as a newbie outsider who's learning the Full-Frontal Holy Bible. A "Song of Songs" game would be rated AO for sure, but I'm more interested in the less scandalous stuff.
@13:53 Pronounced : _Poh-jer_ (POJR)
His videos are fantastic!
They would have lost a massive Chunk of there work force.🎉