Visceral drew the ire of bookworms and literature students when it revealed its videogame adaptation of Dante's Inferno. Some believe the classic poem has been violated by a tasteless videogame company doing tasteless videogame things, but the studio has hit back by claiming that true fans of the poem actually love the game.
"Generally those critics are often people who weren't fans of the poem and weren't that familiar with it until they heard we were doing this," alleges executive producer Jonathan Knight. "What we're finding is, a few people anyway, that quite clearly didn't know it well, now have gone off and read it and they're looking for ways to go, oh you're taking liberties here, or you didn't do this, or whatever. But the reality is that true Dante fans, people who actually have spent time with the literature and care about it are over the moon with the game project.
"I like to say the game is a celebration of Dante. There are more people going to actually read the poem, learn about The Divine Comedy, read up on Dante and what he meant to western culture, than otherwise would have. That's a good thing. The game's not meant to replace the poem. It's not meant to be like, hey, play the game and you don't have to read the poem. The cool thing is the opposite is happening. More people are reading it, not less, because of the game."
I think Visceral has it right. The Dante's Inferno videogame can have as little or as much to do with the poem as you want. It's not taken anything away from the original work, and those crying sacrilege really are getting worked up over something that has no real impact on their enjoyment of literature. It's a videogame. Its job is to entertain us a game, not as a book.
Of course, if the game itself sucks, then feel free to criticize it to the Moon. But let's wait on that, shall we?
Contest:
3:00 PM on 11.23.2009
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I am so fucking sick of "pretentious" being a buzz word now. Liking the poem and studying it does not make you a Hipster. That's the kind of view of ignorant unfortunates that have either never read or haven't understood when they have. If you like reading, or anything intellectual, you're obviously a prick. I mean if I don't understand it, and UI'm great, how could you!>
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I call bullshit on this story though. I read The Inferno a long time ago, and this guy presumes to tell me that I'm over the moon with this game? Fuck you. That's like me saying true Final Fantasy fans love FF7 because it's the greatest. That's ridiculous!
Granted I'm not one of the people that is pitching a bitch, I just saw an Inferno game going in a different direction.
@ thatguyukno:
Nothing can ever REALLY compete with God of War. The gameplay in DI seems more or less to be a copy of God of War's. Ergo, I doubt it can be better. Unless the can add QTE's that are 100% better than God of War III's.
Hey, just because you are an unread ignoramus that doesn't mean everybody is. That said, I think most people with a brain can figure out that naming a game after the first part of Dante's The Divine Comedy isn't going to diminish the original work. I have to agree with Jonathan Knight that some people are going to read about the controversy and actually be introduced to Dante's work. Much ado about nothing if you ask me (sorry Shakespeare).
If this was not considered a literary classic, it's the kind of fucktarded weedinduced monster design of death metal. People love to forget all these silly and "stupid" monsterts that are insulting the poem COME FROM THE FUCKING POEM. So if you're still complaining about how it's a masterpiece that shouldn't be touched or descrecrated, you haven't read the thing. Because most rational people get insofar as the 3rd circle and start calling out the stupidity.
If Doobles is right, and it will serve as a tool to introduce people to The Divine Comedy, then ok. I still think it looks more like a bastardization of the original material than an honest adaptation; especially the Lust level. I really hope Dante comes back from the dead and wreaks havoc on the Visceral Games office.
on one hand, It doesn't affect my enjoyment of the literature, as you say, but on the other...it is a masterpiece you are trying to lift ideas from. a masterpiece so grand it helped shaped the entire western culture as we know it today. And what you do with this? an hack and slash game that bears little resemblance to said chef d'oeuvre?
You are trying to bring a world you (I hope so at least) liked reading to a new medium, and instead of respecting the piece, you dismember it's very essence and spread it across a soulless god of war clone. It's like taking a Shakespeare classic and making a teen comedy with it (:p).
Yes, it will make more people read the poem but...will they not feel deceived when they read something that bears no similitudes with the game they played?
I know it seems stupid to ask ourselves this but: would Dante approve? It's his masterpiece after all. I know I wouldn't accept to see my most significant achievement bastardized like so.
i'm the kind of person that finds viral marketing annoying, so i've become even more cynical about this game than i was originally. at this point, anything i hear about the game is putting me off more and more, so the only chance visceral has to secure even the slightest chance of me buying this game is to SHUT THE FUCK UP (and just make games).
I mean, I'm a comic book fan. As a natural consequence of being a comic book fan, you'll always be "man, would it be great if _____ was in an awesome movie?" Or game or whatever. So there is some expectation of a great adaptation down the line. So there is an genuine interest and desire for this and thus genuine disappointment if it fails.
Now, who in the holy fuck reads poetry and is hoping that there is a great video game adaptation of their poem down the line? I mean seriously. Are there people going, "man I hope they adapt Edgar Allen Poe's the Rave as a game... verbatum!!" This has nothing to do with any genuine offense or disappointment. You just feel like talking, because you are smart and everything you say has deep profound meaning and all that. Not that I care, do whatever, I just always find petty and shallow behavior by the intellecualista to be hilarious.
@ dogestyl. Ummm, so far everything I've seen about this game blows God of War 3 out of the water. It's not a shameless God of War re-hash, it is to God of War as God of War was to the typical action adventure games of it's day. God of War is so last-gen. It's like Halo. It's a fine game, but it's not up to snuff with the current-gen. Both wouldn't really be as well known if they weren't console exclusives.
It doesn't make a person pretentious to be passionate about Dante's work, or anything else for that matter. A person becomes pretentious when they act like something is (almost literally) God and must be worshiped as such (like the way Shakespeare is treated). Acting pretentious is when you don't really like something as much as you say you do but acting like you do to look elite and special. Why do you think wine clubs exist? No one gives a shit about alcoholic grape juice enough to start a club. It's the image that people want.
It also doesn't help when you cram some random French into your writing. That's probably the best way to spot someone like this.
1) I find it hilarious the amount of people who'll defend this but piss on video game movie inaccuracies.
2) While I'm not saying it SHOULD be verbatim. If it could stay as accurate as possible I think it would speak volumes for video games. Just sayin'.
It's not about violating the orginal -- if McDonald's comes up with a "Mona Lisa Burger" tomorrow, I wouldn't feel that it ruined the Mona Lisa, but I'd still be like, "That's super-lame of you, evil clown corporate conglomerate. And claiming that it will 'raise awareness' of art is similarly lame."
But I'll still check it out because it's carnage in hell, and I support that. :)
@enteringoblivion : I care about alcoholic grape juice, enough to want the good stuff more than the bad stuff. I get your point. I'm just sayin'. ^_^
GOD OF WAR>WHAT EVER ITS CALLED!
And who are these poem fans excited for it? Because as far as I've ever heard, only a handful of videogame site reviewers have seen actual previews and no one else.
I think this is more made up "offenders" because Dantes generates the sound of crickets everytime people remember God Of War 3 will come out around the same time.
Not as if The Divine Comedies are widely regarded as one of the most important and influential books in western literature, or anything.
I will say some of the ad stunts they've pulled are kinda dumb though. It cheapens the perceived quality of the game. I did play this game at Comicon and have to say, it was pretty good.
by taking nothing from the poem except the idea of hell broken into circles.
"Generally those critics are often people who weren't fans of the poem and weren't that familiar with it until they heard we were doing this,"
not only do the people who complain not understand our greatness...
"What we're finding is, a few people anyway, that quite clearly didn't know it well, now have gone off and read it and they're looking for ways to go, oh you're taking liberties here, or you didn't do this, or whatever.
...the people who complained are all stupid posers.
"But the reality is that true Dante fans, people who actually have spent time with the literature and care about it are over the moon with the game project."
...and if you don't agree with us, you're dumb.
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The anti-intellectual attack by EA, the developer, and the defenders of this game is depressing to me.
Pickles the Drummer: Hey douchebag!
[(game) is lowered down]
Pickles the Drummer: Happy birthday!
Nathan Explosion: Well what do you think?
Toki Wartooth: Big fat (scythe) and everything!
William Murderface: But I already got, like, a million (video games!).
Pickles the Drummer: Dude, not like this one. This is (about ans dudes traveling through the Hells!)
Nathan Explosion: It's all souped up... and DESECRATED!!!
Skwisgaar Skwigelf: Yeah, dude, and the (monsters, have, like, other monsters coming from out theirs boobz)
.
Pickles the Drummer: And... you're entered in the first ever Dethklok Dethmolition Klok-a-matae Deth Derby (Hell tour of METAL)
Toki Wartooth: And I made you this macaroni murder lady! What used to be the red hots were the blood, but I ates them.
William Murderface: You mean I get to (slice up demons and trample innocent souls)... literally?
[sheds a bloody tear]
just have fun
A true lover of the arts will never begrudge somebody for having their own adaptation to a story. Marcus Sanders and Sandow Birk rewrote a contemporary version of The Divine Comedy in the new millennium. They also had their own adaptation of the story. We should also look at Gregory Macguire's adult novels adding on to The Wizard of Oz. And lets not forget every loser living in his Mom's basement writing a novel that's canon with the Star Wars universe.
I leave you all with one question; What is so wrong about loving somebody's work so much you create your own adaptation?
So maybe Milton's Paradise Lost next? I'd love to play as Lucifer kicking it "300 style" against the other 2/3rds of the angels.
I play video games. In fact, I play a LOT of video games. I played God of War and enjoyed it. I've played games as old as the original Wing Commander (DOSBox and some joystick tweaks, if one is interested, but originally on a DOS-running 486-50 when I was 7) and as new as the latest Tales of Monkey Island (which was lovely among even the loveliest games.) So it's not like I'm UNFAMILIAR with the way gaming works. I like action games as much as the next guy, and perhaps more so.
Thing is, we can't spend our whole life playing video games, and I got an education in the liberal arts, particularly in Philosophy and Theology. On the plane on the way to my alma mater, I picked up the Inferno. This was Fall 2005. I didn't just study Dante; Dante was my constant companion as I read every one of his Western influences in order, with the exception of his Italian poetic influences, which I read on the sly. I can reasonably say that I have grown attached to the poet on the level of what very nearly approaches a literary friendship, and given the degree of amusement it has elicited from my peers (perhaps reasonably) I do not think it pretentious to reveal this, because people do pretentious things in order to elevate their image; I get into Dante, as my classmates would say, a bit too much.
So I'm no Johnny-come-lately to this conversation. I heard they were making a Dante's Inferno game, and my heart sank. You know why? Because I knew that there was no way for one to convey sensual entertainment through an action game medium without utterly pissing on the story of the Comedy. I mean, unless you make the Inferno some kind of slow-paced platform game with interjected commentaries, which would make no sense as a video game, it just wouldn't be profitable.
Now, I was ready to just tell myself, okay, they're making an action game, whatever, perhaps they've read it enough that they will at least convey the salient themes: that the souls in Hell are there by a constant and eternal movement of their own wills to evil; that there is an underlying divine justice in which love and punishment are not just compatible but even intimately connected; that sin deforms the human person; that man can be saved through love.
What did I find? The movement of their wills isn't eternal, they can be "absolved", brought to repentance IN HELL; that apparently the "good karma" option is to do so, as though their punishment was unjust; that the Pilgrim, as the instrument of this absolution, is not thereby deformed (since the action is unjust), thus misrepresenting what itself is really a sin; and that apparently LOVE can only be saved by man, as Beatrice (Beatrice, for God's sake! the instrumental cause of his ESCAPE from Hell, not the bloody provocation for his ENTRANCE!) is apparently kidnapped...by LUCIFER? Lucifer, who's stuck in the ice at the center of the damn cosmos. Lucifer, whose every action is per se illustrative of his entire and complete impotence with respect to the cosmic order. These alone make me want to retch.
And then, of course, there's the fact that Visceral sits in their office yammering into their webcams about how true to the source material they are. Look, say that the only thing from the book is the setting, say that it's not ACTUALLY an adaptation of the work, but don't insult the collective intelligence by claiming that this is anything but an excuse to make money off of a recognizable franchise.
Dante once had a papal encyclical (In Praeclara Summorum) written praising him as "the Catholic poet", and recommending that his work be a part of any Catholic education. To claim that this depiction is true to his work is to insult an artist who had far more brilliance in the little finger of his non-writing hand than the entire creative staff of Visceral Games.