The producer of a new Bible-themed video game aims to help young people engage in Scripture in a transformative and powerful way. As more young people leave the faith, Arve Solli believes Gate Zero, his new interactive video game, could help them re-engage.
Solli recently told CBN’s Faithwire, “We really want to dive into creating a video game for the younger generation to be able to experience Jesus and to be able to get familiar with the stories and the events from the Bible.” His efforts come as statistics show young people are becoming increasingly more secular and less connected to Scripture. According to the Barna Group, 41 percent of teens never use a Bible, and just 20 percent read one weekly.
Solli continued, “This game might be the only Bible some people read, so that’s basically what we want to do. We want to take players back, back to origin, back to zero and make them able to dive into this huge world of the biblical stories and events.” Gate Zero, set in a dystopian world in 2072, sends players on a quest through time to solve a mystery.
The idea was created in 2020 when Solli and his team created an interactive model of the Second Temple for a Christian youth camp. But the digital creation wasn’t used at the camp that year. Solli said, “Three weeks before this event was going to be held, COVID came, so everything was just canceled, and we were there with a model of the Second Temple and didn’t know what to do with it.” With the world suddenly shut down, Solli and his team got creative, transforming the digital effort into a full-scale video game, giving campers a wider, more profound look at the Bible.
Three years later, Gate Zero is scaling the project to create an inspirational experience for young people worldwide. He said, “We believe that the younger generation, they need to get familiar with the Bible and they need to, at least when they are making decisions in life, they need to be able to understand on what ground they are taking the decisions. So, we see the gaming medium as a really, really effective way of giving them context, telling the stories and also interact with the stories and events so they are able to understand the significance of the message that Jesus came with.”
It seems the idea is resonating in a big way. A recent Kickstarter for Gate Zero shattered the team’s goal in mere days, bringing in over $300,000. Fans can currently play a 20-minute Gate Zero demo, with Solli and his team planning to release a full version of the game featuring 30 stories from the Gospels in 2024.