Durham - Bible Adventures

Boss Fight Books

Los Angeles, CA

Copyright 2015 Gabe Durham

All rights reserved.

ISBN 13: 978-1-940535-07-4

First Printing: 2015

Series Editor: Gabe Durham

Book Design by Ken Baumann

Page Design by Adam Robinson

Throw a Bible in It

In 1990, not long before they began making Wisdom Tree titles, Color Dreams came out with a truly worldly game that, had it been licensed by Nintendo, would have never made it past Nintendos censors.

Menace Beach stars Scooter, a young skateboard punkblond in the box art, black-haired in the gamewhose sassy girlfriend, Bunny, has been kidnapped by Demon Dan, a villain Nina Stanley created to look like her boss, Dan Lawton.

This was just one of the games several inside jokes. Scooter was based on Nina Stanleys seven-year-old son, a surfer enemy was based on her coworker Jim Treadway, and then there was Suki Yashi, a sumo wrestler who appears to be based on American WWII propaganda aimed specifically at dehumanizing the Japanese. But in fact, Suki was based on Color Dreamss lead game testers, a pair of obese high school dropouts that the development team called the Sumo Brothers.

A frantic sidescroller with abysmal hit detection, Menace Beach is another game in which avoiding objects as theyre hurled at you is a full-time job. Scooter scoots through beaches and sewers to rescue his love, who in a common video game trope, communicates directly to Scooter through girlfriend ESP between levels: Listen up, Dog Breath! begins one message. If youre still planning on that date at the malt shop, youd better get me out of this mess now, nerd.

But more important than Bunnys taunts is that her clothes fall off a little more between each level. Seeing just how much comes off is intended to be the players chief motivation for pressing on. Time or Demon Dan eventually strips Bunny down to her bra and panties before the last level, but instead of the fully nude humpfest ending the thirteen-year-old male demographic is teased with, the credits end with Scooter and a fully-clothed Bunny on a wholesome malt shop date, gazing chastely into one anothers eyes.

There is , however, an actual pornographic version of Menace Beach . Miss Peach World (1991), released only in Asian territories by a company called Hacker International, subs out Scooter for a white-haired Marilyn Monroe clone and shows pixelated drawings of naked women in between levels. The Peach referenced in the title is Princess Toadstool herself, the cover art portraying a big-breasted Peach floating happily away from an angry Cheep Cheep fish, but Peach (and, for that matter, Cheep Cheep) appear nowhere in the game.

To their credit, the Color Dreams team had nothing to do with the Miss Peach World hack. It would take them several more years before they would bastardize Menace Beach themselves.

In fact, they waited so long to do it that the resulting Wisdom Tree title, Sunday Funday: The Ride , would bear the dubious honor of becoming The Last NES Game Ever Produced. 1995, the year Sunday Funday was released to an unnoticing public, also saw the release of Mortal Kombat 3 , Tekken 2 , Twisted Metal , and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness . The world was nearly nostalgic for old NES titles, not hungry for new ones. (To be fair, Wisdom Tree was also porting four of their NES games to Sega Genesis in a bid for continued relevance, but they updated the games graphics only marginally.)

So what is Sunday Funday , the historic Last Game, like?

In short: Its a hell of lot like Menace Beach .

Each of the games in the Wisdom Tree catalogue could be pretty easily divided into two categories. (1) Games that were clearly conceived of as Christian: Bible Adventures , King of Kings , Spiritual Warfare . The makers of these games, while mostly not Christians themselves, are clearly asking themselves, What would Christians want? and delivering on that as best they can. (2) Pre-existing Color Dreams games modded to look Christian: Exodus , Joshua , Bible Buffet , and Sunday Funday. In honor of Sunday Funday , I propose we call them Throw a Bible in It games, or TABII for short.

The protagonist of Sunday Funday is an unnamed young man who looks exactly like Scooter from Menace Beach , but with one important difference: a Bible has been digitally inserted into his hands.

His mission has changed as well. No longer is Scooter trying to rescue a girlfriend with a taste for easily dissolved clothes, hes just a sweet kid trying to get to church on time. If only the jerks in his town would let him! It seems this is the Sunday everyone is against you: Sailor Sammy, Businessman Bert, Plumber Pete. Who are these raging atheists that dont want you to go to church? asks the Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) in his YouTube video on the game. And while the manual has it that each member of the heathen townsfolk simply wants your assistance unplugging drains, scraping barnacles, and mowing lawnsNone of the things they have to offer should stop you, warns the games manualthe in-game mechanics make it clear that theyre actually out for blood.

And so, apparently, are you. While some of your unholy distractors can simply be ignored, the sidescroll often halts, Double Dragon -like, until your enemy has been properly disposed of. In Double Dragon , this made a certain sensethese thugs are from the gang who stole your girl! (Probably!) Here, the mechanic makes it clear that your job is not merely to make it alive to Sunday school, but to have murdered as many townsfolk along the way as possible. For all you squeamish peacemakers, the games manual reminds us to remember what is most important; going to Sunday school to learn from the Bible.

For Sunday Funday , Demon Dan wouldnt do as a final bossdemons are nothing to joke aboutso Dan is replaced with Big Brown Bear. And why not? It worked fine for the end of the donkey game in King of Kings . Here, the manual does not attempt to build up the bear with any epic lore, or even a single attribute, but says simply, Hey! where did this guy come from! No need to worry, you can get past this because we know that all things are possible with God.

In place of Malt Shop Bunny is your Sunday school teacher, whose red dress and matching heels unfortunately stay on for the entirety of the game, but she does encourage you in your violent journey and warn you about the dangers youll soon face: If you pass the plumber, he will try to slow you down!

Interestingly, though, each of her encouragements is prefaced with the explanation, You imagine what your Sunday school teacher would say. This clarifies how shes communicating with you and nicely circumvents the potentially occult practice of ESP. However, the prescience of her advicesure enough, theres a plumber to avoidhints that our hero may not be going through this ordeal for the first time. Maybe this Sunday slaughterfest is a weekly thing. How many must die for this sociopath to get to church on time?

Even though Sunday Funday is the inspiration for the term TABII, which Ill redefine as any product that appears to have been hastily rebranded for Christian consumption, its not the only TABII offered by Wisdom Tree. Its not even the only TABII offered in the Sunday Funday cart.

Billed as another three-in-one, Sunday Funday contains a puzzler called Fish Fall where you catch falling fish and toss them up into a basket. If this doesnt sound particularly biblical, its because its entirely based on a game Roger Deforest programmed in his spare time from his bedroom in Newport Beach. Its working title was Hand Job, but in its completed form was called Free Fall.

Originally inspired by Lemmings , Deforest conceived of a game where instead of the little people falling down and dying, you had to catch them and throw them into a basket to save them, so he simply started creating it. Deforest enjoyed having full creative control for once. I could build any level and any type of enemy I wanted to without having to answer to Lawton, Eddy, or the Sumos. Since I had the skills to do the coding, artwork, and music, nothing stopped me from just making a game that I wanted to play.