Fire and Brimstone, Guns and Ammo

"It doesn't say who you pray to," he said. "I don't think the word 'Christian' is anywhere in the game play." Likewise, the game has only a " 'Star Wars' level" of violence. "There's no blood or gore; people just fall over," he said.

Lyndon says he hopes to give parents and gamers an option for an action-packed title that also gets players thinking about eternal matters.

"If you have two games and one has a good theme and one has a bad theme, people are generally going to reach for the one with the good theme," he said.

The Grand Theft Auto games are well-designed but have a bad theme, in his view. Lyndon intends for the Left Behind games (follow-ups to Eternal Forces are already in the works) to contain a religious theme that is "not preachy or dogmatic."

An early version of Eternal Forces has already won respect in write-ups on gamer Web sites. Until now, religion-oriented video games have tended to be relatively weak efforts -- far from cutting-edge and more the sort of lame thing Ned Flanders's kids might play on "The Simpsons."

One of the best-selling Christian game titles, called Catechumen, sold 86,000 copies, just a fraction of what most games need to make a profit.

In addition to the usual ads in gamer magazines, Left Behind Games is taking an inventive approach to the market by sending a million free sample copies of the game to churches around the country. It's a marketing tactic reminiscent of last year's "Left Behind" movie, called "World at War," which screened at megachurches and avoided commercial theaters altogether.

Game fans who like the "Left Behind" books say they are looking forward to Eternal Forces. Heath Summerlin, a Christian gamer who lives in South Carolina, said he thinks the game "could reach a broad spectrum of people who wouldn't necessarily be exposed to the books or go to church."

Summerlin has read a few of the "Left Behind" books and is interested trying the game when it comes out. In all honesty, though, he said, he's still more interested in the popular online game World of Warcraft, where he belongs to a Christian-oriented group of players called "Redeemed." The club, which Summerlin calls "a ministry outreach within the game itself," has about 250 members, who gather their characters in an online prayer before going on missions each day.

Ralph Bagley, designer of Catechumen and a spokesman for the Christian Game Developers Foundation, said Eternal Forces could turn out to be the first game to break out of the Christian market and appeal to secular audiences, though he is concerned by some reports about it.

"You can't kill people in the name of God and put it in the game play and hope it won't offend people," he said.

On the other hand, Bagley said he understands the need for a gamemaker to put in plenty of action to appeal to the market.

"There are people out there who think that if it's a Christian game, it has to be about putting two animals on an ark," he said. "But how many people are going to play that?"