Davidic Matchup

Year 1995, shareware educational games for Christian families. That niche existed, believe it or not, and Dan Sharpe contributed to it with Davidic Matchup — a puzzle game resembling tic-tac-toe with a biblical theme centered on King David.

The game is built on stories from the Old Testament, specifically the life of the Israeli king David. Labeling it as a platformer is at least misleading — it's more of an educational puzzle or matching game where the player connects images with stories or concepts from the Davidic tradition. Goliath, battles, psalms — material that in other hands might have been dry memorization, here got dressed up as a game.

The controls and mechanics fit the era and purpose: simple, accessible, designed for children or Sunday school instruction. The game reportedly even offered so-called Hesed Cards — optional helper cards that made matching easier. Hesed is a Hebrew term for mercy or loving-kindness, so even the name of the helper mechanic was theologically thought-out. Whether it worked in practice as an engaging game loop or as a digital coloring book, I wouldn't dare judge without deeper experience with the title.

Instructions were built right into the game under an INST button, which was standard for shareware titles in 1995 — no printed manual, no hotline. You download it, run it, read the instructions on the spot. The game targeted an audience that knew David and Goliath from church, not from gaming culture, and tailored its demands accordingly. Nobody expected Dark Forces difficulty or Gabriel Knight narrative depth — what was expected was accessibility and moral message.

Today Davidic Matchup is a curiosity. Evidence of how Christian communities in the mid-nineties sought their own path into the digital world — outside mainstream violence and fantasy, with their own value framework. Gameplay-wise it probably didn't age particularly interestingly, but as a document of that era and subculture, it has its charm. Anyone who today fires up a DOSBox emulator and runs it won't get the gaming experience of the year — they'll get a glimpse into a specific niche of the shareware era that otherwise barely survived at all.