Bible Builder

Bible Builder was released by Everbright Software in 1992.  These were still the early days of the PC, when DOS was in common use and "multimedia" was the greatest thing in the world.  The gaming scene was still young and dominated largely by platformers and adventure/RPG titles.  Wolfenstein 3D would be released this year, beginning the FPS revolution.  The period saw a lot of educational software that was supposedly going to revolutionize learning.  Some were actually good, and made excellent use of the technology available, while other were complete garbage that amounted to little more than a slow, confusing to navigate textbook.

Into this realm stepped Bible Builder, a trivia game designed to increase Bible knowledge for those who had an interest in the topic.  The thing that made it stand out in a sea of educational products and games is just how good it was.  Even today, trivia games are cheap and easy to come by and often dry and lifeless in the extreme.  What made Bible Builder different is that it took the trivia concept and pulled it off with so much style that it just came alive.

Bible Builder sports beautiful graphics for its time and a midi soundtrack that sounded great (on the FM synthesis hardware of its time, at least), and it interjected enough variety into the gameplay that it was easy to forget that it was basically just a trivia game at its heart.

The basic premise of the game is that you have to collect fragments of a bible verse and then correctly tell the game where in the Bible the verse is found.  The playfield is laid out like a book with several bookmarks.  Select a bookmark to view an animated scene and its accompanying question.  Questions are multiple choice and involve general Biblical knowledge, geography (where Biblical events took place) and identifying hymns based on a midi rendition of the melody.  Correctly answer a question and you get a fragment of scripture, which fits together with others like a jigsaw puzzle.  Within each scene there are many clickable "hot spots" that explain the scene or just provide humorous commentary when you click on them.  Increasing the difficulty is a timer in the form of a candle to the left of the screen.  As you visit scenes, this candle begins to burn down.  Once it burns out altogether, your time is up.  The game has several levels of difficulty, some of which give you ample time to visit and answer each question, while high levels give you only enough time to collect a few fragments of a verse before you must identify it.  The game is not afraid to pull verses from areas of scripture that are less commonly known, so having a Bible handy to do some digging is usually key.

A testamony to the excellent design of the title is that the quality and fun-factor are not strictly regulated to the Christian market.  Currently the game holds a "Top Dog" rating from homeoftheunderdogs.net.