You know you are reading a great story when you find yourself lost in the world the writer has created. Literary worlds have been explored in film, but now one is available on your Xbox or PlayStation: Dante’s Inferno.

Inspired by the real Dante Alighieri, the video game tells the story of a soldier who defies death and fights against impossible odds — for love.

What made Electronic Arts choose Inferno as source material? Creative director and executive producer Jonathan Knight explains why the epic poem works so well as a video game:

[Dante] fundamentally mapped hell with this poem. He’s created a visual topography, and there’s a tremendous amount of structure, geography, weather — and monsters.

Electronic Arts is also releasing a print edition of the poem with illustrations from the game to “encourage a new generation of gamers to read Dante’s original work”. While I find it doubtful this will actually happen, it is interesting to think of other literary and gaming mashups like the ones on Wired Magazine’s list of 10 classics that should be video games. Who’s up for a game of The Metamorphosis?

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Tags: gaming, literature

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 5:54 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.