When I first read this, I presumed it was a new Devil May Cry title. Actually, no. EA are making a game based on Dante's Inferno, the first in the trilogy The Divine Comedy.
This is extraordinarily left field. I wonder if it will be at all faithful to the book, in any way artistically accurate? Gamasutra has more.
Inferno is a bloody infernal read, too. I had to have a go at it at college; it's wonderful, but also incredibly arcane to a modern audience; for instance, one of the more very serious sins is Dante's hell is blasphemy, which these days is pffff. It'd be interesting if the game explored some or all of the various more unusual sins, but it could quite easily end up being just another gory shmup set in hell featuring a ton of cookie-cutter scary-things.
Apparently Universal's gone after the movie rights already though, although - weird. The Divine Comedy is in the public domain, so why Universal would prefer to make a movie out of the videogame (and pay over 6 figs for the rights) rather than just make their own, I don't know...
I wonder if the video game will be annotated? All the people that Dante meets in hell were real people, he knew many of them. But for the most part no one will know who the hell (ha ha a pun) those people are. It's an awesome poem, but for the most part it's just Dante walking through hell talking to Virgil and the denizens he meets. There is no badass fighting, the whole affair starts out with Dante calling himself a coward and running away from wild animals! The only one who does any kind of defending against the demons is Virgil who they can't hurt anyway and all he does is talk to them. I just can't see them staying true to the poem and have it be an interesting game. In fact I don't really see how they could make it into an interesting game at all. It's an awesome read and would make a great movie for historical buffs, but I think they could have chosen a better poem to make an adventure game out of. Perhaps one where there is actually some adventuring.
Posted by: n1nj4g1rl | December 15, 2008 at 23:07
Here's the weird thing: Ken *Bioshock* Levine and Irrational developed a game based on *Inferno* nine years ago, but it got killed before it launched. It's weird the publisher didn't use the success of *Bioshock* to revive it, but maybe they tried. It seemed totally cool to me:
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/11/15/xbox/index3.html
A loose adaptation of Dante's "Inferno" (it even includes a Virgil figure, though in this version, the Roman poet looks more like a bipedal lizard), it's the story of a young single mother who must travel through the nine circles of hell to retrieve her dead child. In hell, Amanda is assisted by corporeal embodiments of her soul (for good and ill), and each ring of the underworld is actually a manifestation of modern evil -- violent sinners, for example, are condemned to a plain resembling a World War I battleground, and the greedy are confined to a perverse Las Vegas.
Posted by: Wagner James Au | December 16, 2008 at 01:57
My bet is it turns into totally derivative God of War wannabe. Bah-frikkin-humbug!
Posted by: Kim Pallister | December 16, 2008 at 07:45
Surely another bloodfest...moneymaking videogame!!!
Posted by: Matt | December 16, 2008 at 12:48
This looks like a pretty cool video game, are there elements in this game that are related to the 7 layers of Dante's Hell?
Posted by: Games Car | January 03, 2009 at 18:52
I think it looks quite good, its definitly one that I am going to purchase quite shortly.
Posted by: Louse | January 21, 2010 at 12:13