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Though the target audience at first was other Christians who loved the genre but detested the gore, a vision quickly coalesced for Catechumen to reach beyond the defined Christian subculture. "We gave it a biblical focus, but we didn't want it to be preachy," Bagley says. "We wanted to expose the kids who are playing all these games with all the garbage in them to some life. We created the concept of picking up scrolls as health items, and having them flash on the screen, exposing the kids to the Word of God that way. We left the preaching pretty much out of it."

Such a strategy, he says, helped when it came time for marketing. "Many secular distributors are willing to carry our game because it's not real preachy, but we have over 300 verses of Scripture in the game, and that goes into the kids because they have to pick up those scrolls. The Word of God will not return void. We've seen a tremendous impact within the gaming community just in the last few months since the game has been on the shelf. Kids are writing in telling me, 'I never knew the Bible said that cool stuff.'"

The team began production in spring 1999. Eighteen months and $850,000 later, the game was released into the Christian market. The demand for Catechumen began to take off in the general market after some wise ad buys in magazines like PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World, and fortuitous inclusion of the three-level free demo (which can be downloaded at catechumen.com) on around two million demo disks to readers of U.S., U.K., and Japanese game magazines. Demand increased after favorable and enthusiastic reviews in USA Today ("deftly matches its secular counterparts challenge for challenge and thrill for thrill"), the Chicago Tribune ("the most ambitious effort to date" of "a groundbreaking crop of Bible-inspired action titles") and Web sites like SeriousGamers.com ("proves without a doubt that a first-person-shooter title can still be immensely fun even without extreme levels of violence and gore") and Gamezone.com ("a welcomed spin on an established genre"). And a recent arrangement with software distributor FindEx assures the game will soon be on shelves at CompUSA, WalMart, Babbages, and other stores.

Catechumen is exploding out of the confines of the Christian underground into the jaded and cynical gaming universe with authority. The reason is simple: It's all about quality. Unlike Catechumen's Christian market predecessors War in Heaven and Saints of Virtue (both of which Bagley said he has played and enjoyed), this one was made with the kind of budget that allowed for industry-standard visual rendering, sound, and detailed game play. Catechumen is still maybe a year behind the bleeding edge of the industry (its one-player-only structure is considered a sin by several of the reviewers, for example), but is graphically advanced enough to require some serious hardware. The game's soft-sell approach to faith doesn't hurt. Though it is obvious from the very beginning that there is an agenda at work, the issue is not crammed down the player's throat.

"There are compromises to deal with," Bagley confesses, "but ultimately when we released the game, we were shocked at the secular demand for it." Those who are convinced that seeing brief images of occult symbols (or violent and sexual imagery) has an effect on the viewer can be encouraged that Catechumen instead uses hundreds of Bible verses.

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February 19 2001, Vol. 45, No. 3