Dante's Inferno Becomes Video Game

Dante's Inferno becomes video game

Players to kill demons in nine circles of hell

(ANSA)
- Rome,
December 18, 2008

- Dante's Inferno, the first book of the Divine Comedy, is soon to be released as an action-adventure video game by the company better known for its FIFA Football and James Bond game series.

The new game developed by America's Electronic Arts (EA) follows the structure of Dante's 14th-century masterpiece, turning his nine circles of hell - limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery - into levels that players must travel through, killing demons as they go.

''It was the right moment to adapt this masterpiece of world literature for the universe of interactive gaming and to introduce Dante to a public who isn't very familiar with his work of art,'' the game's executive producer Jonathan Knight told French newspaper Liberation.

''The tormented universe of the Italian poet represents an ideal basis for a third-person action-adventure game''.

Full details of the game are under wraps, but the company has released a trailer which shows a massive Terminator-like Dante skewering a crucifix into the brain of a bald demon.

The trailer ends with the game's tagline, 'Go to hell'.

Italy's greatest poet, Dante (1265-1321) lived and worked in Florence until he was forced to flee in 1302 because of fighting between political factions.

He spent the last 19 years of his life in exile before dying in Ravenna.

The Ravenna monks who guard Dante's ashes have refused several pleas from Florence to return the poet's remains.

Dante's tomb in the northeastern Italian city is a big tourist draw, rivalling the lure of its Byzantine mosaics.

Experts believe he began writing the Divine Comedy, which comprises Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso (Hell, Purgatory and Paradise), in 1308, finishing just before his death in 1321.