GABE DURHAM

Playing with the idea of resurrecting my tumblr as a home for my absurd storytelling project, DOCTOR BORING. Curious to see how this displays here. (Note: This, and all the other stories, are fiction.)

The text version of this one was published by COVER:

Finally, tiktok is where the story popped off:

My new ebook, Locked Away, just came out from Publishing Genius. It’s $3! In a land where cellars have just been invented, a new class of criminals—kidnappers—begins to experiment with locking people inside their cellars. Here, a bean farmer, a fig merchant, and a vicious marauder prove humankind’s capacity for abusing new technologies in this strange world populated by dunderhead criminals, sad…

Bible Adventures is Out Today

                  Hey!

My new book, Bible Adventures, just came out.

It’s about video games and christianity and capitalism.

I think it’s one of the best things I’ve written, and also one of the most accessible.

It’s $15 or it’s $5.

You can read an essay from the book called Spiritual Warriors at Electric Literature.

Another excerpt called Mining for Treasure is up at Entropy.

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Recently, I…

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A new 9/22 essay, An Execution, was published in the new Austin Review. It’s a print mag, but featured as one of their try-before-you-buy samples here.

I was interviewed by Entropy Magazine & 4 color rebellion about Boss Fight Books.

I edited an anthology of video game writing. It’s called Continue? The Boss Fight Books Anthology. It began as a small side project for Kickstarter backers and…

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This week I hit the launch button on a Kickstarter for Boss Fight's second season. It's going great! But because I am running the show, I've only BARELY gotten to share anything about my own contribution to the series.

For over a year, I've been semi-secretly working on my own entry in the series, a book called Bible Adventures. This will be my second book after FUN CAMP and my first leap into nonfiction, but I've noticed that it's taking up some of the same obsessions as before: looking at a part of my childhood that I once accepted as completely normal and realizing, with adult eyes, how strange it was.

If you've never heard of it, Bible Adventures is an unlicensed NES game from 1990 where you play as Noah, David, and Moses's mom. It was made by a (secular) game company called Color Dreams who realized they could make a lot more money if they started selling Christian games. They changed their name to Wisdom Tree, rebranded themselves as a Christian company, and began selling their games through Christian bookstores. For awhile, it totally worked and they made a lot of money.

This AVGN video makes for a good introduction to the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkNvQYiM6bw

Everything about this story is interesting: - The games are nutty. Some were made from scratch to tell Bible stories while others are simply reskinned versions of previous games. One is a Wolfenstein 3D mod.

- The sales team was made up of Christians and the development team was mostly atheists and agnostic. They'd code Bible games them go to a strip club.

- One of the developers was a Christian until the boss of the company challenged his faith (with the problem of pain--why would a good God allow suffering?) and that developer has been an atheist ever since.

- It's a portrait of a time in culture that had never existed before and will never exist again: When Nintendo absolutely ruled gaming culture, when games were "just for kids" and heavily sanitized, when Christian bookstores were at their apex.

- I get to use the book prod at the weird intersection between faith and commerce. Jesus was so clearly not a capitalist, but we've done an awesome job of turning him into one.

For the book, I interviewed developers Dan Burke and Roger Deforest, head honcho Dan Lawton, current Wisdom Tree owner Brenda Huff, and--stealing an idea from Jon Irwin--I got a speedrunner named Brian Lee Cook to teach me a few new things about how the game does and doesn't work.

What I like most about this book is that it's turned Boss Fight Books from a respectable project into a vanity press overnight. But what I also like is how I'm taking the whole premise of Boss Fight--one game/one book--and cheating on it as much as possible. While the book spends the most time focusing on Wisdom Tree's most popular game, Bible Adventures, it also explores each of their other titles: King of Kings, Exodus, Joshua, Spiritual Warfare, Bible Buffet, Sunday Funday, and Super 3D Noah's Ark.

This isn't false modesty but an economic fact: My book is a hard sell. Maybe the hardest sell of any book in the series. These Bible games have been played by many but loved by few, and there isn't a big fan community to rely on for support.

But it really is the Boss Fight book that I wanted to write, and working on it has been some of the most fun I've had in my shortish writing career. My hope is that there will be something here for those who do and do not give a shit about Nintendo games. I think I found a way to use video games as both a subject and jumping off point to talk about faith, commerce, and community. “We all made the best of what we had to work with, and had a good time doing it," Wisdom Tree developer Roger Deforest told me in an email. "It's funny that I mostly remember the people at Color Dreams more than I do the games.”

I'm glad to add author to my multi-hyphenate role in Boss Fight, and to shelve my book alongside Ken, Mike, Anna, Michael, Darius, Jon, Matt, Ashly, Anthony, Derek, and Daniel.

You Can Order My New Book in the Boss Fight Books Season 2 Kickstarter Campaign

This year I’ve been secretly working away on a new book about the unlicensed NES game Bible Adventures and the game development studio who made it.

This morning, Boss Fight Books unleashed a new Kickstarter campaign to fund the book along with five others:

Baldur’s Gate II by Matt Bell

Metal Gear Solid by Ashly and Anthony Burch

Spelunky by Derek Yu

World of Warcraft by Daniel Lisi

a new…