I have played video games since I was a kid. I remember being 4 years old watching my dad play our PlayStation and I was obsessed as soon as I could hold a controller. I played every game I could and it became my favorite thing to do as a kid that wasn’t toys or playing outside. As I have gotten older, I have realized that my parents never really set limitations to what kind of games I could play. I was playing things like Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat, which I maybe shouldn’t have played. Of course, I played things like Mario and other family friendly games but I loved to play the ones that my dad liked. These always happened to be more mature games.
The more I have progressed in my walk as a Christian, I have begun to analyze the media I consume. One of my biggest hobbies is video games and in this modern age most video games tend to feature themes which may be sinful or “Unchristian”. If you look at most video games, some of the highest selling games feature things like murder, extreme violence, nudity, and foul language. Most of my Christian friends agree that they try to avoid television or movies with these themes. In this case, you can find shows and movies that are more family friendly. To avoid all of the mentioned themes, I decided to look into “Christian” video games. I have noticed that they have existed for over 40 years but they have never hit the mainstream. So my question is this, why aren’t Christian video games popular with the general public?
Christian video games first started in 1982 with games being published on TRS-80 color computers. Most of these games were limited due to technology and could really only be word games or trivia games. In 1984, the games became more story focused and would generally stick to stories in the Bible. This changed in the 1990s when these games started to be released on the NES. The company “The Wisdom Tree” began producing many different story based Bible games. These ranged from Mario clones to Doom/Wolfenstein clones. The Wisdom Tree was the biggest producer of Christian games during this era. The issue with these games is they were all unlicensed and could only be sold in Christian book stores. This severely limited sales. Most of these games did not do well with reviews and were often called boring and uneventful.
The years continued and Christian Games were still being produced and still are today, however, the problems they had still continue today. The games are often purely focused on singular stories in the Bible and do not translate well to the video game medium. I think that is the reason why Christian games do not do well. They focus on the Bible and people who are not Christian do not feel invested or enticed by this. If I was a little kid and was used to playing things like Call of Duty, then I would hate to play a game about Noah’s Ark or some other biblical story. Christian games succeed when they keep the Christian themes but focus on original stories. Every criticism I see of Christian games makes it seem like it is an easy fix. Christian games can seem too niche to the average gamer. If we have a game that tells an original story while also keeping Christian Themes then we could maybe start producing popular Christian games.
