Christmas Matchup!

Year 1994, Christmas is approaching, and somewhere in America, Dan Sharpe sits at his computer thinking about how to explain the nativity to children. The result is Christmas Matchup — a shareware memory game with a Christian message that spread faster than carol singing through Sunday schools on floppy disks back then.

The game is straightforward: a grid of cards with biblical motifs that you flip and search for matching pairs. No plot, no characters, no world to explore. The goal is to memorize the card positions and match them as quickly as possible. Instructions are available directly in the menu and, according to the text of the time, were meant to introduce you to the "greatest story ever told" — the Christmas gospel. They don't hide the educational intent here.

The mechanics are classic memory, nothing more. You click, flip, remember, match. An interesting element is the so-called Grace Card, which automatically finds a match for the card you just flipped — a nice mechanic for younger kids who might otherwise get stuck. Mouse control works fine even today, the interface is simple to the point of being spartan. For an action genre, which is what the game gets classified as, that's a rather generous categorization — nothing shoots or chases here, you mostly just sit and concentrate.

What do I remember about it? Honestly — this particular game never passed through my hands back then. Shareware with religious themes was a bit out of left field for the Czech nineties scene. But DOS memory games had ten variants on every theme imaginable, and this genre had a clear function: cheap, easy, no hardware demands. Christmas Matchup is exactly that — a functional, undemanding tool that served its purpose. The graphics are modest, the sound probably nonexistent or minimal, and it all aged exactly as you'd expect from a solo developer working in their spare time in 1994.

Today I'd recommend it to one very specific group: collectors of DOS shareware curiosities and people interested in seeing what educational software looked like back when "educational" mainly meant "you're not shooting aliens." As a Christmas gaming experience, it has zero competition. As a testament to everything that was churned out on floppy disks in parish halls, it's a small and innocent artifact of its time.