The 16-bit Catholic

Note: Finding Christ in the Classics will focus on finding Christian elements in old games. Not going crazy with it, such as comparing Mario's coin collecting with the Israelites collecting gold to melt into an idol, but just a general Christian theme. Hopefully I'll run this once a week.

As much as I loved Mario growing up, I have more fun playing the original Sonic the Hedgehog nowadays than I do on any of the plumber's classic adventures. And I realize that later Sonic games are vast improvements over the original (adding the spin dash, bigger levels, more characters), but there's something about the original that holds my imagination hostage.

It's your standard platformer with a speed gimmick, and looking back, there isn't anything too groundbreaking about it other than that speed. You move left to right, jump on bad guys to destroy them, collect things of value in each level, and fight a boss at the end of a section of levels. I could have just described Mario, Bonk or Sonic, so let's spare any "Sonic was innovative" arguments and just enjoy the game for what it was/is: a damn good platformer.

Failure of Technology: No I'm not going to go into this whole rant about technology being the sign of the end times. But I like that, no matter how technologically advanced Robotnik is, he's still just as weak as he was to start the game. For all of his technical prowess, it isn't enough to stop good from conquering evil.

And don't we see that in scripture? People decided to build The Tower of Babel as a monument to their own greatness, thinking so highly of themselves. And God struck them down, scattering them with different languages. Isn't it nice to see Sonic strike down Robotnik, who thought so highly of himself that he decided to try conquering Mobius?

Robotnik is a good lesson for all of us. No matter how great we as a society think we've become, no matter how advanced we think our philosophies are, we've got nothing on the Creator. Just like Robotnik, our tech and skills are no match for the power of God.

Next time you play Sonic the Hedgehog, just think to yourself: I'm playing out a really intricate Salvation story. Or just have fun playing.

Thanks to my future bride Allicia for coming up with this goofy idea. What kind of penance would I give the different villains in video games, if they were Catholic and came to confession and I was a priest? We've got a glut of villainy here, and if these bad guys can do it in my imagination, perhaps more of us could visit the confessional in real life.

Just read a nice article in Catholic San Francisco about a priest in the Phillipines and a guy in San Mateo teaming up to create a video game, entitled Paolo's Journey, that is based upon Pope Benedict XVI's Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

"The idea of using video games to teach catechism was not a stretch for me,” Ronald Schaffner said. “I was excited to use the medium that is so often aligned with negative stories due to violence in some games for something positive.”

The article goes on to talk about Schaffner, head of The Studio of Secret6, assisting the priest for free, instead of charging at least $25,000 like some of the other studios would have done. The priest, Maximo Villanueva Jr., actually studied 3D animation at one time, so he isn't a slouch either.

I have no idea how the game plays, but the graphics don't look bad considering that it is being produced on a small budget. Still, the game has lava. I'm tired of lava in video games! That and water, both cheap obstacles that require absolutely no thought. Shame on you Father!

I don't think Paolo's Journey will supplant any current video games in a 12-year-old's library, but having that choice could be fun, provided the game gets an international release at some point. And it's good to see someone with talents helping out a priest in need. Good job Catholics for working together!

Being a good church-going kid, I thought it was really awesome when, at six years old, I played The Legend of Zelda for the first time and saw a cross on Link's shield.

"Wow, he must be a Christian too!" The game never explicitly mentioned Christianity or anything religious, save for the word "magic" being thrown in front of different items and said cross, but when you're a six-year-old kid, you don't need a video game to spell things out for you: that's what your imagination was for.

Whatever game I played, I just imagined that my character was Christian. Heck I even got in trouble for this line of thinking once: While playing Super Mario Brothers 3, I asked my cousin Amelia if the goombas I just killed went to Hell (fair question). Amelia, who was probably about 11 years old, paused the game and said to me "dustin, Hell is a very bad place." I can't remember what else she droned on about, but she never really answered the question, probably just telling me not to joke around about Hell, which I wasn't doing.

The first two NES Legend of Zelda games had a lot more Christian references. The graveyards had crosses, and several web sites confirm that the magic book was called Bible in Japan. And in the second Zelda game, one of the items you had to collect was an actual cross that allowed you to see flying Moas (which kept you from dying). Of course, none of this means anything if you buy the Supreme Court's ridiculous notion that a cross is a secular symbol, but for me it meant that somehow I was playing Christian video games. And not the crappy Wisdom Tree ones either!

But as time went on, the cross disappeared from the series, with Link's shield getting replaced by a logo-less design in A Link to the Past, then getting the triforce/pseudo Islamic treatment in Ocarina of Time. In fact, http://hyrulianreligion.webs.com has a nice feature on all of the shields in the game's series,

So was I right to think that my 8-bit hero was Christian? If I had seen this image below, courtesy of http://www.zeldawiki.org/Symbols, when I was a kid, it would have blown my mind.

Apparently the pic is official Nintendo artwork, being shown in two Japanese strategy guides in Japan for A Link to the Past, according to the Web site (the U.S. guide from Nintendo does not feature the image). I know that later games injected an original fable about three goddesses creating the triforce, so it'd be hard to play the newer Zelda games and come away thinking Link was Christian.

Still, it's nice to know that the six-year-old version of me was on to something.