PlayStations of the Cross

The Rev. Ralph Bagley is on a very 21st-century sort of mission: introducing the word of God into what he calls the "dark Satanic arena" of the video game business. But he has an old-fashioned calling to back it up.

Bagley put his project on the proverbial shelf, and there it sat until the shootings at Columbine High School.

"Two of the investors that I had originally contacted--and they didn't know each other--called me back after Columbine," he told me recently, "and said, 'Listen, you know, I've been hearing this stuff on the news'"--much of the follow-up coverage focused on the teen killers' devotion to "first-person shooter" video games like 'Doom' and 'Quake'--"and now I kind of feel like maybe I should support this." With almost a million dollars in seed money, Bagley not only developed his ancient-Rome game, "Catechumen"--an early term for a convert--but also founded his own Christian game-development studio, which he named N'Lightning Software.

"We're going to hold the word of God up and illuminate the place," Bagley likes to say. "We're taking the land back from Satan."