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Rated 'C' for Christ: New Game Brings Light to Dark Industry

CBN

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For many students, the typical college experience includes studying, staying up way too late, meeting new friends that will hopefully last a lifetime – the list goes on.

But Peter Venoit and Simon Matthews, animation students at Virginia's Regent University, have some bigger goals in mind.

They're creating a video game they hope will make a big impact on the gaming industry.

Rated 'M' for Mature

Fifty nine-percent of Americans say they spend time playing games, qualifying it as at least one of America's favorite past times.

Unfortunately, of the top five most popular video games, only one wasn't rated 'M' for mature.

With the creation of a game called "The Guarding of Eden: A Dragon's Dream," Venoit and Matthews are working to prove that video games don't have to be for mature audiences to be fun and entertaining.

"So we're animation students and as we create these ideas and create these stories, we're thinking we just don't want to be animators for other people," Matthews told CBN News.

"We want to be animators to bring to life our own projects and to tell a Christian story or a story that has a redemptive theme to it, or a story that includes faith," he explained.

Venoit said, "The games that I felt were the best ones always had an M-rating, mature, and to me something about that just didn't set right with me. They weren't necessarily telling mature and deep stories."

The game gives you the chance to save the world -- or destroy it.

"Slash Talon is the main character," Venoit explained. "He's a dragon that's been raised in an environment where everything around him was just built on war and just that survival of the fittest mentality of if you're not strong and you're not as much of a weapon as you can be, then you are weak and worthless."

"And so I feel like that plays into how we play most games. We want to be the strongest and most agile," he said.

Venoit and Matthews have assembled an all-star team to make the game a reality.

"We also want it to be a beautiful game," Matthews told CBN News. "We have an artist who worked for DreamWorks whose doing a lot of the background art for this game and he's really contributing a lot. He really wants to make this an A-list title."

Worth the Effort

The project requires 8-10 hour work days on top of their school work. But the best friends say the project is worth the effort.

"This project is really important to us because throughout our time here we've been taught about, we've been encouraged to be Christian leaders to change the world," Matthews said.

"And so that's why this project is really important to us because our passion is to spread good news. We feel like God has put this particular story in our hands for us to tell," he added.

"The Guarding of Eden" team hopes to have the project completed by December 2015.
          
***Not only does creating a video game take a lot of time. It also requires a lot of money. If you'd like to learn more about how you can help Venoit and Matthews, visit Garden of Eden's fundraising site. 

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