Whenever I go to Youtube I have the tendency to end up watching a string of videos that have nothing to do with whatever I intended to watch in the first place. I just cannot stop clicking on random links, thus watching videos I don’t even care for. It was on one of those occasions that I ended up watching a trailer on an upcoming video game, called “Dante’s Inferno”. To put it mildly the game couldn’t be further away from the book, at least judging from the trailer (one can always hope this is a joke and the video game will somehow be completely different). I first thought it must have been made by some hallucinated kid in his basement after a Doritos intoxication, but to my surprise the game is being made by EA (Electronic Arts), a powerhouse in the game industry.
To have chosen a classic that has the mind-blowing complexity and beauty of the Divine Comedy to make this video game can only be defined as blasphemy. What we have here is not exactly the worried Dante humbly following Virgil to the underworld after having lost his path. In a quite free interpretation of the book, we have some kind of Crusader on steroids that kills demons left and right with a scythe. And as if that weren’t enough, it seems Beatrice has been kidnapped by these demons, so he actually has to rescue her. I mean… really? The other way around would have probably been more accurate! For Dante, his beloved Beatrice is as close to being the Messiah himself as any other human being will ever be. As a matter of fact, she is the one touring him through Heaven for instance. So it seems that what we have here is some kind of mix between Conan the Barbarian and Doom with a fancy title. This is the game’s trailer (this one is actually longer than the one I originally watched):
