Dante's Inferno - The Video Game

The New York Times has a piece, "Abandon All Poetry, but Enter Hell With an Attitude," about the new video game based on Dante's Divine Comedy.

From the piece...

Mr. Knight, of the company’s Visceral Games studio, first contemplated a game based on hell — rich with gothic scenery and nasty denizens to attract young male gamers — 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,” Mr. 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.”

What the company’s marketing research turned up, said Phil Marineau, a senior product manager, was confusion. In a survey of 800 people, Mr. Marineau said, 83 percent said they had heard of Dante’s “Inferno,” the first book of his “Divine Comedy,” but fewer than 20 percent could explain its contents.

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; a Facebook application that invites users to send their friends to hell; and Electronic Arts’s first Super Bowl spot.

Entertainment Weekly also weighs in, offering up other suggestions for literary-minded video games.