There’s a new edition of Dante’s “Inferno” in bookstores. Same words. Different cover. It’s got a big picture of a muscular fellow in a spiky crown and an overline that says “The literary classic that inspired the epic video game.”
It’s true. “Inferno” is now a video game, with a brawny, armor-clad Dante as its protagonist. Like a fallen soul, it is facing some stern judgments, from prospective players as well as Dante scholars who wonder why a classic needed updating at all.
But the game’s creators say their research showed that most people had heard of “Inferno” but few knew what it was about. This, they say, gave them license to make a few improvements.
“If you’re trying to make an action game, it’s thin,” Jonathan Knight, the game’s executive producer, said of the original text. “It’s Dante, who’s kind of passive, and he’s a poet and he’s philosophical. We had to take the bold step of saying, ‘How do we make this guy an action hero?’ ”
The “Dante’s Inferno” game, which Electronic Arts is releasing for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles on Tuesday, is its own epic undertaking: an unapologetic attempt to build an entertainment franchise on a 700-year-old literary masterpiece. It comes after a yearlong marketing campaign that will culminate tonight with a TV commercial during the Super Bowl.
But players may find that this version of that pitiless part of “The Divine Comedy” doesn’t necessarily correspond to their memories from comparative literature classes. In the video game, Dante is no longer a reedy, introspective poet but a knight who returns home from the Crusades to find that his beloved Beatrice has been brutally murdered. Her innocent soul has been taken captive by Lucifer, and Dante must chase the archfiend into hell, fending off waves of demons with a scythe.
Knight, of the company’s Visceral Games studio, first contemplated a game based on hell three years ago and quickly realized that Dante’s detailed imagining of the netherworld provided an ideal blueprint.
“It’s almost like the original Dungeons & Dragons map,” Knight said. “You’ve got this big King Minos as the judge of the damned. You’ve got Cerberus the three-headed dog guarding gluttony. And then, obviously, the big guy in the ninth circle.”
To keep its vision of hell fresh in players’ minds, the company has given the game a substantial promotional push: a fake religious protest held outside the gaming industry’s annual E3 Expo last year; a Dante’s Inferno comic-book series produced by DC Comics; an action figure and animated DVD; and a Facebook application that invites users to send their friends to hell.
The marketing has irritated some gamers, who consider it pandering. Some saw through the phony protest before the company acknowledged it had been staged; others have complained about the new paperback edition of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation of “Inferno,” which bears artwork from the video game on its cover.
Within the world of academia, however, reaction to the game has been cautiously curious. “The story line is not Dante’s, period,” said Teodolinda Barolini, the Lorenzo Da Ponte professor of Italian at Columbia University and a former president of the Dante Society of America. “It’s kind of a mishmash of current popular ideas projected back into the Middle Ages.”
That said, Barolini was eager to visit this whimsical version of Dante’s hell, with its concentric circles of worsening vice.
Christopher M. McDonough, an associate professor of classical languages at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., was skeptical that the game would encourage more players to read Dante’s work. “I wouldn’t abandon hope that it would lead people that way,” he said, “but I don’t hold out a lot, either.”
McDonough said the fundamental proposition of “Inferno” differs from a video game.
“While it is fantastically imaginative, it is ultimately frustrating,” he said. “You’re pushing your rock from one side of the circle to the other, for eternity. What could be more frustrating? Whereas the point of the game is satisfaction: to win, to achieve the quest.”
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