Religious Battle Taken to the Video Screen

Posted by Cynical Sarah on March 28, 2006

Gods and prophets have played important roles in religions and civilizations for thousands of years. Some still have a strong following and some have faded somewhat, but noone has been able to determine which religion along with its gods and prophets is the ultimate one – until now.

EA Sports released “Religious Rumble” a video game pitting different gods and prophets against each other.“This is a game that should appeal to people all around the world no matter what religion they are,” said EA Sports media representative Scott Speedman.

The game features characters such as Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Thor, Zeus, Athena, Rah and more. Players can choose which god or prophet they want to be and then go head-to-head against all the others.

“The game is similar to ‘Mortal Combat’ in structure where the players fight in hand-to-hand type conduct,” Speedman said. “Each character also has a unique special ability that they use in combat. We tried to give them all powers based on what they could do according to legends and religions.”

Looking at a few, Jesus has super healing powers that allow him take a lot of damage in the game, and his special weapon is a staff. Thor was fashioned after Norse legend. He has a large hammer and the power to freeze his enemy for a short time. Rah’s special ability is to burn his opponents with sunrays.

“Buddha was a tough one for us because he’s generally considered to be very peaceful,” Speedman said. “After deciding on the chubby, happy Buddha image for the game, someone noticed that he sort of resembled a sumo wrestler. So he has a sumo style of fighting and his special ability is to temporarily calm his opponents so they don’t fight back.”

All the characters were given fair and equal powers. The player’s skill is what determines how far a character can go in the game and if they can beat the other characters.

“The goal is to learn all of the characters’ fighting styles and increase your own skill with the character of your choice,” Speedman said. “For example, I like playing as Zeus because he has cool lightning bolts. But I kept losing to Mohammed until I learned to better work with Zeus’ abilities and also learned more about Mohammed’s fighting style to figure out his weaknesses.”

Speedman said any character can potentially conquer all the others in the game, it just depends on the player.

“Not favoring one religion or god was very important to us,” Speedman said. “We really tried to keep it as fair and impartial as possible. This game is meant to be entertaining, not controversial.”

In anticipation of controversy, EA Sports not only made the game as impartial as they possibly could, they also included educational materials for all the characters.

“For all of our games we try to provide a storyline and background for the characters to make the games more interesting. In this case, history has already provided us with storylines for all of the characters,” Speedman said. “We provided accurate, yet more entertaining, stories for all of the characters from Buddha to Rah to Jesus. So the game can actually be a learning tool for each religion or mythology represented.”

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