Of all the random Wikipedia articles I stumble upon, this one definitely had me saying, “wait, what?” more than once.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_3D_Noah's_Ark
The game that would eventually become Super 3D Noah’s Ark was originally conceived as a licensed game based on the film Hellraiser, a movie that Wisdom Tree founder Dan Lawton was a great fan of. Wisdom Tree acquired the game rights to Hellraiser for $50,000, along with a license to use the Wolfenstein 3D game engine from id Software, believing that the fast, violent action of Wolfenstein would be a good match for the mood of the film.
Eventually the Hellraiser game concept was abandoned due to several issues: the hardware of the NES was found unsuitable because of its low color palette and the addition of a co-processor would have made the cartridge far too expensive for consumers. … In addition, the management at Wisdom Tree decided that developing and publishing a horror-themed game would clash with their religious, family-friendly image.
If you haven’t seen it, check out AVGN’s video on this. He did a whole series of these weird bible games.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/F-Oph3z7S4M?si=Q_R3BKGtuBtRWbqh
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
How could they do Hellraiser on SNES when Mortal Kombat wasn’t even allowed blood?
Wisdom Tree’s games weren’t licensed/approved by Nintendo, and they devised various bypasses for the lockout chips / copy protection. So had they continued with the original plan, I doubt they’d have worried much about getting anything approved by Nintendo.
As the game was not officially sanctioned by Nintendo, Wisdom Tree devised a pass-through system similar to the Game Genie to bypass the system’s copy protection, where the player had to insert an officially licensed SNES game into the cartridge slot on top of the Super 3D Noah’s Ark cartridge.
Wisdom Tree, Inc. is an American developer of Christian video games. It was an offshoot of Color Dreams, one of the first companies to work around Nintendo’s 10NES lockout chip technology for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Color Dreams formed the Wisdom Tree subsidiary in 1990 in an effort to circumvent Nintendo’s restrictions against publishers of unlicensed video games for the NES by selling their games at Christian book stores which was not subject to pressure by Nintendo.
aaaaaaaaaaah ok that fits
I don’t have any wisdom tree NES cartridges, but I do have a few of the unlicensed carts. The ones I have, have a switch to adjust the amount of power used by the cart to fool the lockout chip.
Reminds me of this Wolfenstein mod
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
