Other Wisdom Tree games included Exodus (a conversion of Color Dreams' old Crystal Mines game, with the story of the Israelites' 40-year desert trek grafted onto it), King of Kings (similar to Bible Adventures, but now featuring three events in the early life of Jesus Christ), and Bible Buffet (a "video board game" with Bible quizzes, with the board done in a similar style to Candy Land. The game sold 350,000 copies, encouraging the company to continue pursuing this path of making games. 2, applied to three different Bible stories: Noah collecting animals for the Ark, saving Baby Moses from Pharaoh's men, and re-enacting the story of David and Goliath. The company's first release as Wisdom Tree was Bible Adventures, a three-in-one multicart which borrowed many gameplay elements found in the Western Super Mario Bros. The black cartridges are identical, and bear the name Color Dreams. The actual game used the Crystal Mines/ Exodus engine. A Wisdom Tree product catalog shows screenshots from Joshua & The Battle of Jericho, displaying a side-scrolling game using the Bible Adventures engine. Interestingly, many of their games were total conversions of titles previously released by Color Dreams, with appropriate changes in theme. Most 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.
Wisdom Tree's titles always had a Christian theme to them, and were often sold in Christian bookstores and the like. Earlier Wisdom Tree games used the blue Color Dreams cartridges. Ultimately, these efforts proved successful, and Color Dreams was able to not only to find a new distribution channel for its games, it was also able to launch a new sub-genre of video gaming, which meant that no other companies competed with its new Wisdom Tree label.īible Adventures cartridge. 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." Wisdom Tree sent Christian bookstores 3-foot Bible Adventures displays, as well as VHS cassettes showing gameplay.
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. 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. Officials at Color Dreams 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. At the time, there were few religious video games for console systems. In 1990, Color Dreams began to consider producing games with biblical themes. Also, many of their games were reported to have problems getting to run properly, and were criticized for their lack of quality and gameplay. Color Dreams thus had great difficulty getting access to the retail market, and decided to work outside of mainstream NES distribution channels. Because retailers could not afford to stop doing business with Nintendo, unlicensed companies were at a disadvantage. Thus, Nintendo began to threaten to cease selling games to retailers that sold unlicensed NES games. 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. In the late 1980s, Color Dreams was the largest producer of unlicensed games for the NES but, due to pressure from Nintendo, faced many difficulties getting retailers to stock its games.