Is Dante rolling—or laughing—in his grave?

By Andrew Kozloski

For February’s meeting, Jonathan Knight from EA’s Visceral Games presented Dante’s Inferno, the game based on the poem La Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy in English).  He informed us with a smile that while his game is doing well commercially despite being up against Bioshock 2, as both the producer and the creative director, we can blame him for everything that’s wrong with it.

Jonathan Knight discussed the 9 levels of Hell

The game has received mixed reviews, with a particularly vocal minority claiming that the game should never have been made at all because it detracts from the worth of the original work.  Actually, he contends, this game has been adapted hundreds of times into various media. Painters had published illustrated versions of the book shortly after its release, sculptures have been created and there are even modern comic book interpretations.  Interestingly, the people the most enthusiastic about this game have been the Italians, to whom Dante rightfully belongs.  In Italy it is the best selling EA game, next to the FIFA soccer games, of course.

                The first illustrated version was done by Botticelli, whose detailed map of the descent into Hell has become iconic in its association with the original work. Mr. Knight also calls him “the first Dungeons and Dragons designer.”  The layout lends itself very well to a game adaptation because it is already divided into levels, each with their own thematic continuity and there is even a strong character in each section easily identifiable with the modern concept of a “boss”.  We have Charon, the boatman, Cerberus, the three-headed dog of Hell and of course, Lucifer, among others.  Mr. Knight speculated on the profound connection that he felt existed between Botticelli and Dante, in that both had been deeply in love with women who died very early.  For Botticelli, this was Simonetta Vespucci, the woman many of us recognize from his painting “The Birth of Venus.”  For Dante, it was Beatrice Portinari, a woman he had loved from afar during his life and who figures principally in both the poem and this video game adaptation.

The level building process...

                Between then and now a considerable number of other interpretations have been made, from the Rodin sculpture The Gates of Hell, which contains the well-known Thinker within it, to paintings by Delacroix. There are even comic books by Walt Disney that feature Dante’s plot.  For this game, Knight called on the painter Wayne Barlowe to assist in the art direction, a man known for his own take on the Hells described by Dante.

                In the original poem there is extremely little action, since it is mostly Dante observing what occurs in Hell and talking to people.  Dead people, that is.  This is not the stuff of video games and therein lies the criticism that has been leveled against the game from some corners.  Knight’s Dante is a muscle-bound crusader wielding a massive scythe and shooting crucifixes at an endless stream of demons.  While it seems fairly clear that Dante was not a legendary warrior (even fainting several times in his poem), he did fight in the Italian civil wars.  Great pains were taken to remain true to his life in other ways as well, such as the inclusion of his actual family crest in cut-scenes that take place in his home in the game.  “Anyway,” Knight quipped, “We did prototype the ‘fainting mechanic’ but it just wasn’t working for the game.”

                For the design of the game itself, everything proceeded from the Botticelli map as a sort of template for the geography and they kept faithfully to it.  Using a device that Knight describes as similar to the choice to save or destroy the Little Sisters in Bioshock, Dante has the option of either punishing or absolving the lost souls that he encounters.  These choices contribute to the power-ups that are available in the game, which are either increasingly holy or demonic.  Along those same lines, Dante himself comes face to face with bad decisions he has made in his life, which he stitches into his flesh so that he won’t forget about them.  These stitches later animate and become the basis for the cut-scenes that lay out the unfolding narrative.

                In conclusion, Knight decides that Dante is neither rolling nor laughing in his grave, just smiling.  “He’s 700 years old and people are still enjoying his stories.”  Finally, if the large and growing Facebook group for the game is any indication, quite a number of people are being inspired to pick up the poem and read it for themselves.

Jonathan Knight with buddy Alex Hutchinson (Ubisoft).