You Can Now Play the Bible Game Nintendo Didn’t Want on the Super Nintendo

There's a funny rumor about Super 3-D Noah's Ark, a retro, family-friendly first-person biblical adventure that was just rereleased on Steam, as well as as a replica cartridge, for its 20th anniversary.

The tall tale has it that id Software, in an effort to get back at Nintendo for censoring the blood and swastikas out Wolfenstein 3D, donated its source code pro bono to Christian software maker Wisdom Tree, which then made the most inoffensive version of Wolfenstein possible.

This game, Super 3-D Noah's Ark, is an innocuous restaging of the biblical story. You are Noah, a brave old bald man with a beard to your pelvis and a smile like Mickey Mouse. You must feed the animals so that they calm down and fall asleep, navigating the woodwork mazes of the ark with a variety of slingshots that fire food instead of bullets.

It's the opposite of Wolfenstein 3D, a pioneer of first-person shooters and video game violence, and yet the resemblance is uncanny, since the two games share code and otherwise feel similar. Wisdom Tree did license Wolfenstein's engine, though internet hearsay assumes that the small goody-goody company must have accessed it through kookier means.

Eli Galindo was quick to shoot the rumor down—and he'd know best, since he remastered the game's textures, music, and controls for its re-release. Galindo is head of Piko Interactive, which creates replica video game cartridges for unreleased games. The rumor is "100% fake," he told Motherboard.

To Galindo and other Christian families, Noah's Ark is a game utterly devoid of violence that children and parents can play together. To the rest of the games market, it is a laughable and banal oddity that has attained a minor cult-like status if only for its absurdity.

Even though the game did have a physical release in 1994, it is extremely hard to find. Further complicating things, the cartridge had a mangled shape, requiring an official Nintendo game to be plugged in on top to sneak around the console's security, kind of like the hardware cheating system Game Genie.

The original Noah's Ark was the released by Wisdom Tree, a subsidiary of Color Dreams, a small company that became known for unofficial NES games. As Color Dreams began catering to a Christian audience, Nintendo pressured retailers to stop selling games that didn't get its blessing. Nintendo was used to pushing video game stores to stock specific games, but it couldn't influence Christian book stores the same way. As a result, Color Dreams began focussing almost entirely on Wisdom Tree, which could get its unofficial NES games in front of a Christian audience, at least.

Strangely enough, Color Dreams originally licensed Wolfenstein's code to make one of the weirdest imaginable antitheses to a G-rated Bible adventure: an adaptation of Clive Barker's Hellraiser horror movies. However, there are few games more painfully innocent than what it eventually became.

When bloggers and video game personalities began to rummage through the trash bins of retro games, Wisdom Tree's Bible-themed titles became fish-in-a-barrel. In a video viewed at least 7 million times, the Angry Video Game Nerd described Super 3-D Noah's Ark as various words of excrement and fart noises.

"People are saying the game is bad without having even played it, just because somebody else said it," Galindo said. "With the HD release, we are proving the game is/was not bad, and we are debunking myths."

Galindo says Piko rereleases games that got a raw deal, were underrated, or treated unfairly for being games that he generously describes as "unpolished." So far Steam users seem to appreciate the upgraded Noah's Ark. As of this writing, the game has a "Very Positive" rating on Steam based on 118 reviews, with one player giving it a score of "10/10 commandments," and it's still on Steam's list of popular new releases.

Galindo expressed interest in giving a second wind to other Wisdom Tree games, and while he wouldn't confirm which one, he did admit his favourite is the Zelda-inspired Spiritual Warfare.

Super 3-D Noah's Ark is available on Steam for $5.