The Adventist Church celebrated a significant digital milestone on March 22, 2023, as its popular gaming app, Heroes: The Bible Trivia Game, reached its 500,000th download. This achievement highlights the app’s growing popularity among global users, who have spent over 18 million minutes playing the game and have answered over 45 million trivia questions.
In just two years since its release, Heroes has become a favorite among gamers and biblical scholars. Through its challenging questions and engaging gameplay, the app celebrates biblical heroes, making it an excellent tool for educating players on the stories and teachings of the Bible.
Williams Costa Jr., director of the Adventist Church’s Communication department, expressed excitement at the milestone, saying “It’s always exciting to see dreams come true. The wonder is that half a million downloads of Heroes is not an end but a big step towards continuing.”
The biblical question-and-answer application developed by Hope Channel and designed by Pastor Sam Neves, associate director of the Adventist World Church’s Communication department, has also become popular for its educational learning purposes. Neves explains that “Heroes has an educational value of biblical immersion. The player follows a sequence of play and learning while playing, so he knows the biblical story without necessarily having to read it.”
App Milestones
As the Adventist Church prepares to celebrate Heroes’ second anniversary on March 25, 2023, the app’s creators highlight the app’s numerous achievements.
In June 2022, Heroes partnered with the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The museum provided a space for Heroes to promote the app and provided opportunities for visitors to play the game and learn more about the app.
Since its launch in 2021, Heroes has also collaborated with Hope Channel, and with Novo Tempo in Brazil. In 2022, Heroes also promoted an online tournament in Brazil in which app players gathered to compete for the possibility of playing in person on the tv show’s special edition featuring Heroes “Bom de Bíbla" on TV Novo Tempo.
The success of Heroes is also reflected in its website’s popularity, with over 100,000 page views last month alone. In nearly two years, the app has become available in almost 15 languages, across the Hope Channel Network, including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Swahili, and Tagalog. Achieving the development goals app creators proposed at the launch of Heroes in 2021 made it possible for the game to become accessible to more users worldwide.
Game News and Releases
In the last two years, Heroes also developed “The Big Questions,” a Bible study guide featuring 20 lessons available in English, Portuguese, French, Romanian, and Spanish. Its main objective is to answer common spiritual questions searched by many users on the internet. In 2022, “The Big Questions” launched its second version in English and Portuguese with 21 new lessons.
On December 24, 2022, app creators added Mary, the mother of Jesus, to the game. Thus, totaling 13 Bible heroes.
Digital platforms were also fundamental for promoting the game. Heroes’ social media platforms published content focused on in-depth knowledge of the heroes, and provided personalized exchanges with the players. Currently, Heroes has over 37,000 followers who daily receive content specifically developed to offer players a more complete experience.
Projections for the Future
As the app’s development team envisions the future of the game, they seek to make the game more interactive and include new questions and new heroes.
Created with the intention of sharing the Three Angels’ Message with gamers and young people around the world, Neves said, “Heroes was born, to encourage [young people] to familiarize themselves with the fascinating stories of the Bible, and to discover they are called to be God’s heroes today, to become Christ’s witnesses.”
Heroes can be downloaded for free on any Apple or Android smartphone device. For more information about Heroes, visit https://www.heroesbibletrivia.org/.
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