In 1994, Super Noah’s Ark 3D emerged as the only unlicensed game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) that was commercially released. Developed by Wisdom Tree, this Christian-themed first-person “shooter” was a reskinned version of Wolfenstein 3D, substituting soldiers with animals and weapons with food. However, without Nintendo’s approval, Wisdom Tree needed to find other ways to sell its game.
The distribution deals Nintendo made with major retailers prevented stores from selling any unlicensed Nintendo game or product. Like the original NES, the SNES used a Checking Integrated Circuit (CIC) lockout chip to keep unauthorized games from being played on the console. In the 1980s, companies like Atari’s Tengen and Color Dreams figured out methods to bypass the 10NES lockout chip in the original NES, but the SNES lockout chip wasn’t cracked until 20 years later.
Source: Reddit
This gave Nintendo significant control over which developers’ games made it to store shelves, a move that helped revive the American console market. Despite lacking Nintendo’s official seal of approval, Super Noah’s Ark 3D bypassed the CIC chip and found alternative channels to sell its game. Wisdom Tree was distributed widely through Christian bookstores and mail-order catalogs. So how did a game that YouTuber Angry Video Game Nerd called “the worst game ever made” manage to become the only unlicensed, commercially released SNES game?
Built on id Software’s Wolfenstein game engine
Super Noah’s Ark 3D started as an officially licensed Hellraiser game
Source: Netflix
Releasing unlicensed games wasn’t anything new for Wisdom Tree. They were started as an offshoot label for Color Dreams, whose founder Dan Lawton was a vocal opponent of Nintendo’s licensing policy. Color Dreams was one of the first companies to work around the 10NES chip and release an unlicensed NES game in 1989. They developed 18 games as Color Dreams, five as Bunch Games, and eight as Wisdom Tree between 1989 and 1995. Color Dreams had a problem, though—they had garnered a reputation for selling bad games.
In 1990, they started the Bunch Games label to release lower quality games without further damaging their reputation. In 1991, Wisdom Tree was formed to release Christian-themed games, tapping into the religious market as an alternate distribution channel since their games couldn’t be sold at major retailers. Color Dreams eventually left the video game industry in 1996, and started doing business as StarDot Technologies. Most employees stayed with Color Dreams as it entered the digital camera market, while the rest joined Wisdom Tree, which remains a video game company today.
In 1990, Color Dreams acquired the rights to create a video game based on the 1987 classic movie Hellraiser. This unreleased game is a story of its own, originally being planned for the NES but utilizing a custom-built NES coprocessor that took advantage of the NES’s unique system architecture. The “Super Cartridge” had reportedly allowed nearly SNES level graphics in an NES cartridge. The game was ultimately canceled due to high development costs and the inability to sell at major retailers because they lacked a license with Nintendo.
Color Dreams had also bought a license to use the Wolfenstein 3D engine as a base for Hellraiser, though, and now they had nothing to do with it. So, they carried over the license to Wisdom Tree, and it became the game engine for Super Noah’s Ark 3D. Development for Hellraiser moved over to Super Noah’s Ark 3D, and ironically, a game with Hell in the title got a Christian-themed religious game started.
Circumventing Nintendo’s licensing system
The pass-through cartridge that made it possible
Wisdom Tree still had a problem, though. Nintendo’s licensing system relied on a lockout chip and without it, unlicensed games couldn’t be played on the SNES. The method developed by Color Dreams for the NES didn’t work on the SNES. With previous games, a voltage spike would be sent to the NES console to “knock out” the CIC chip and bypass it entirely. However, Nintendo had added a voltage regulator circuit with reverse diodes to block excessive voltage.
There was another trick used on NES systems that still worked on the SNES, hijacking a licensed game’s key and using it to trick the system into thinking the unlicensed game had a key of its own. This required custom-made cartridge enclosures though and relied on user’s to attach one of their licensed games directly to the top of the unlicensed game’s enclosure, similar to the Game Genie. Wisdom Tree didn’t really have another choice, though.
Source: Steam
Super 3D Noah’s Ark’s engine, mechanics, and controls were a direct clone of id Software’s Wolfenstein. The Christian-based content is often brought up as a factor in this game’s reputation, but it was made for a niche market, and that wasn’t the problem. The game should have played the same as Wolfenstein, but it’s widely regarded as a terrible game. What happened? Wisdom Tree had reskinned Wolfenstein with religious-themed graphics, but in the process the change in character models threw off the game’s hit detection, making the controls very difficult.
Getting their game out there
An unlicensed game with a distribution problem
Source: Wiki Media Commons
Unlike most unlicensed SNES games, which remain obscure, there are still copies of Super Noah’s Ark 3D available today. The game’s rarity contributes to its collector’s status, but it also hasn’t been lost to time. While it never saw the same success as mainstream SNES titles, its presence in religious retail outlets gave it a distribution model different from any other licensed SNES game. Color Dreams’ idea to create Wisdom Tree and tap into the Christian market paid off.
Super Noah’s Ark 3D was sold through Christian bookstores, mail-order catalogs, and other stores catering to religious audiences. Since the company exclusively made religious-themed games, it was an attractive alternative for parents concerned about violence and sexual content in video games. Like the Satanic Panic in the 80s, concern over video games caused a hyped-up moral panic, leading to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) being created in 1994.
Source: Wiki Media Commons
Mainstream media had been pushing a “violence in video games” panic for over a year. Congressional hearings initiated and led by Senator Joe Lieberman scrutinized the gaming industry for greedily marketing inappropriate content to children. Lieberman stated, “Few parents would buy these games for their kids if they knew what was in them” and “We’re talking about video games that glorify violence and teach children to enjoy inflicting the most gruesome forms of cruelty imaginable.” and went on to say he’d “like to ban all violent video games.”
Super Noah’s Ark 3D’s release was perfectly timed—a first-person shooter where you didn’t shoot anyone.
Super Noah’s Ark 3D’s release was perfectly timed—a first-person shooter where you didn’t shoot anyone. For any parent whose child was pressuring them to buy violent video games, it looked like a great alternative. And being an exclusively religious-based game company made for a great brand image. As the public moved on, and new gaming systems replaced the SNES generation, Super Noah’s Ark 3D could have faded with time, but that’s not what happened.
The game gets a new start
But not for the best reasons
Over the years, the game developed a cult following, its claim to fame being called the “worst game ever made” by Angry Game Nerd on YouTube.
Super Noah’s Ark 3D was a notoriously awful game with a unique backstory, perfect content for YouTube, and because its reach wasn’t as wide as it could have been if sold at a major retailer, its rarity makes it a collector’s item. The rise of retro gaming, with classic ports available on our phones and a back catalog of classics on Nintendo Switch Online, has contributed to the renewed interest in older titles. This led to a reprint of the game in 2014, this time by Piko Interactive, a video game publisher and developer that focuses on re-releasing classic games and making them available on newer systems.
Source: Piko
Wisdom Tree and Piko Interactive know the game’s reputation and status among gamers. The founder of Piko, Eleazar Galindo said that he wanted to make the game in a normal SNES cartridge instead of the pass-through cartridge, and that’s what they did. With Super Noah’s Ark 3D revived yet again, who knows how long it will remain in the public zeitgeist? It’s even available on Steam if you don’t have an SNES.
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A one-of-a-kind legacy in gaming history
Super Noah’s Ark 3D stands as the singular game that defied Nintendo’s SNES licensing restrictions and still found success in its own way. It may not be a good game, but it’s a game that has lore. Some projects just don’t work out that smoothly, and going from Hellraiser to Super Noah’s Ark 3D’s seems like it would end in failure, but the game has stuck around for over 30 years.
Source: eBay
Super Noah’s Ark 3D is a rare example of going up against Nintendo, a company known for aggressively protecting its brand, while also breaking the rules when no other company did. The way the game bypassed CIC restrictions by using another cartridge’s licensing key is an interesting story on its own and explains why the game is in a goofy-looking third-party cartridge.
It’s also a notoriously bad game and is so clearly a reskin of Wolfenstein that it passes that threshold into funny. Super Noah’s Ark 3D is still being talked about today because of its oddity. A seemingly mismatched genre for a religious game—especially with its origin in ‘Hell’—combined with terrible controls and a YouTube celebrity ‘endorsement’ make this story more fun than the game itself.
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source: https://www.xda-developers.com/breaking-the-rules-the-only-unlicensed-snes-game-ever-commercially-released/
