Reading Notes: Dante's Inferno, Part A

In high school, I wrote a ten-page paper over one of the Inferno's various allegories. To be honest, I can barely remember the specifics of what I wrote about, besides that it centered around Virgil.

I do remember, however, that when I wrote that paper, the video game adaptation of the Inferno had just come out. I had done a bit of my own research over the game, only to conclude that it was quite a bit different from the text. This seems to happen a lot, especially to the Inferno. It seems to be a popular text for game developers to reference, too, interestingly. The video game "Dante's Inferno" is the most on-the-nose, even though the story is different. The game's plot features Dante, who is a sinner searching for repentance, journeying into Hell to rescue his love Beatrice, as she has been captured by the Devil. In reality, Beatrice doesn't appear in the Inferno at all, and is only mentioned. In real life (as far as I can remember from high school, anyway) Beatrice and Dante were decidedly not lovers. Instead, Dante was a little obsessed with Beatrice, and wrote about her constantly. Their relationship sounds a little more like a stalker-thriller than a love story.

Regardless of all that, the game stays faithful in the game's environment, which is definitely where the game potential always lied. Dante's descriptions have spawned dozens of paintings and sculptures, so it follows that the next adaptation would be highly visual, too. And in a video game, players can explore the nine themed layers of hell. As far as I can tell, the level design is fairly close to the text's descriptions. For example, the final few hours of game play take place in an icy ninth circle of hell alongside the Devil.

I could go on, because I legitimately think video games are one of the coolest mediums to adapt the Inferno to varying degrees. They're all about exploration, world building, and visuals. There's a much longer list of games that have referenced the Inferno without outright adapting it; to name a few--Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Castlevania, Fallout, Resident Evil, all of which are popular/successful franchises.

Basically, I'm all about video games as storytelling mediums, and it's so cool how a work as old as the Inferno can be adapted to such a new form of media.

Sources:
Tony Kline: Dante's Divine Comedy

Wikipedia: The Divine Comedy in Popular Culture
TvTropes: Word of Dante

Image: Wikimedia Commons: Levels of Hell