Wisdom Tree

Wisdom Tree is a manufacturer and distributor of Christianity-themed video games, primarily for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Wisdom Tree was born from the husk of Color Dreams, one of the first companies to work around Nintendo s lockout chip technology on the NES.

=History=

In the late 1980s, Color Dreams was the largest producer of unlicensed games for the NES, but it faced many difficulties getting retailers to stock its games, due to pressure from Nintendo. Although Color Dreams violated no laws in opting out of the Nintendo licensing system with its workaround of Nintendo s lockout chip technology, Nintendo was displeased that it was receiving no revenues from Color Dreams games, and wanted to prevent other companies from following suit. Thus, Nintendo began to threaten to cease selling games to retailers that sold unlicensed NES games. Because retailers could not afford to stop doing business with Nintendo (some stores, such as as Toys R Us derived over 50% of their revenues from NES sales), unlicensed companies got the boot. Color Dreams thus had great difficulty getting access to the retail market, and decided to work outside of mainstream NES distribution channels.

In 1990, Color Dreams began to consider producing games with bible themes. At the time, there were no religious video games for console systems like the NES. Officials at Color Dreams correctly saw that there was a market for them and that many stores that would be most interested in retailing Christian games -- Christian bookstores -- were likely not to sell video games at all, and thus not vulnerable to pressure from Nintendo. While many Christian bookstores at the time sold much more than books -- they also sold religious movies, Contemporary Christian music, and other goods -- such stores did not sell video games. In order to convince these stores to sell religious games, Color Dreams, through its new Wisdom Tree subsidiary (which would live on long after the demise of its parent company) worked hard to promote this new genre of video games. Wisdom Tree sent Christian bookstores 3-foot Bible Adventures displays, as well as VHS cassettes showing gameplay. These promotional videos made the case to Christian bookstores using lines like: This game promotes bible literacy and teaches children about the bible while they play a fun and exciting Super Mario Bros. style video game. Ultimately, these efforts proved successful, and Color Dreams was able not only to find a new distribution channel -- one Nintendo could not harm -- for its games, it was also able to launch a new genre of video games, which meant that no other companies competed with its new Wisdom Tree label.

=Games=

Wisdom Tree s titles always had a Christianity theme to them, and were often sold in Christian bookstores and the like. The games attempted to use the medium to tell Bible stories in such a way as to make them interesting to children of the video game era. Interestingly, many of their games were total conversions of titles previously released by Color Dreams, with appropriate changes in theme.

The company s first release as Wisdom Tree was . The game sold reasonably well, and encouraged the company to continue pursuing this path.

Other Wisdom Tree games included copyright date. Arguably, the Wisdom Tree game with the most interesting history behind it is Super Noah s Ark 3D , the only unlicensed game ever released for the American Super Nintendo Entertainment System. This conversion of the Wolfenstein 3D engine featured the player, as Noah, attempting to quell upset animals on the Ark by flinging sleep-inducing fruit at them. A popular urban legend regarding this game holds that id Software, the creators of Wolfenstein 3D , were so disgusted with the high amount of censorship that was performed on the game for its SNES port (among other things, all references to Nazi Germany were deleted and the dogs replaced by rats) that they licensed the Super NES code to Wisdom Tree, simply out of spite for Nintendo. While that story may or may not be true, the fact remains that this game does retain much of the map structure and layout of the SNES Wolfenstein 3D .

=Current Activities=

Wisdom Tree is still somewhat active today, selling religious video games. They have also released an all-in-one TV controller system featuring seven of their NES games in a single, self-contained unit. More recently, they have released Heaven Bound (game) , a more modern 3D game for the PC. These games are produced on 3D Game Studio (e.g. Joseph and Galilee Flyer ), using the default models that come with the program. It should be noted that on a technical level, Wisdom Tree games for the PC are quite primitive. [http://www.sega-16.com/Feature-%20Wisdom%20Tree%202.htm]

=See Also=

*[http://www.wisdomtreegames.com/ Wisdom Tree s website] *[http://www.ccgr.org Christ Centered Game Reviews] for reviews of other Christianity-themed games

=Sources=

*[http://www.planetnintendo.com/thewarpzone/colordreamsshrine1%5Cwisdomtree.html A history of the company] *[http://www.sega-16.com/Feature-%20Wisdom%20Tree%202.htm]