Talking 'Dante's Inferno' with Visceral Games' Jonathan Knight
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Leading up to the release of the game, Game Hunters talked with the game’s creative director and executive producer Jonathan Knight of Visceral Games (Dead Space), one of Electronic Arts’ studios.
Knight studied classical theater at Boston University before getting into the video game industry. “I have been at Electronic Arts for nine years and about half of that was spent on The Sims,” Knight says. “So this is a different direction. maybe since I had been doing family-friendly stuff for a while I really wanted to do something a little more mature and darker. Prior to coming to EA, I was at Activision and I worked on Return to Castle Wolfenstein and some of the id products, so it’s not the first time I’m working on something that is darker. but it was exciting to get back to a more story-driven kind of thing.”
Talk about the decision to create The Inferno as a video game.
In 2007, I was given an opportunity to create a new project with a new team. a lot of people at Visceral Games wanted to do something kind of dark and explore some dark fantasies. I just got interested in idea of Hell as a video game and the idea of levels of a game based around the medieval worldview of death and the afterlife. It was just a topic that I was gravitating toward. Not ancient mythology or fairy tales, but really specifically the medieval Christian mythos around Hell and the afterlife.
I didn’t feel like that had been done in a game before and not really even in a movie, in terms of trying to go right at it. So that was kind of the impetus. you start doing that research and the name that comes up is Dante Alighieri. He was the guy who synthesized everything that was purcolating over that period of time and several hundred years before him about what Hell would be like and if people were going there, why are they going there, what are they being punished for, how are they being punished? He kind of synthesized all of that into this incredible work that we know as The Divine Comedy today.
Reading (The Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy), it felt like a game’s worth of material and rather than just borrow ideas here or there, we thought we should just go right at it and do a game that would be a loose adaptation that nonetheless really encapsulates that work of literature and we’d call it Dante’s Inferno and use its characters and locations and themes. That’s how it happened. The execs loved the idea and they gave me a lot of freedom.
Had you read Dante before?
I hadn’t really. I think I was probably supposed to read the whole thing. I was much more into Shakespeare and Moliere and people like that. I took a lot of liberal arts courses where we had to read Chaucer and so forth. but I was not focused on Dante until I got interested in doing this game set in Hell and at that point picked up the poem and read and started to really get into it.
Could you speak to the artistic license needed to make this into a game? for example, the transformation of Dante into a Crusader.
The first thing that kind of jumped out at me was the notion that (Dante) had mapped out Hell. you see the nine circles and where the rivers come together and the city of Dis (the walled city at the bottom of Hell, home of Lucifer). He is very specific about the level-based geography and that is the part where we are definitely the most faithful. and then the characters, he almost sets up like boss characters every level. We definitely crafted the game around Dante and Beatrice, who is his ideal who has died and gone on to the afterlife and he is pursuing her.
For the characters the setting and the environments, we tried to stick to the book, but pretty quickly you realize there is not much of a strong narrative in the poem. The historical Dante is not action-oriented. He is kind of led along by Virgil and so in order to make it work we just knew we were going to have to sort of re-imagine him and that was probably the first really big challenge to the projecct. The notion of him as a fallen Crusader really came from a couple ideas. The real Dante’s great-grandfather was a crusader and the real Dante himself was embroiled in some Italian civil war, more as a politician than a warrior. It was a stretch to say he was a warrior, but we just needed to do that to make him believable as an action hero.
And then the other thing was that you are fighting through the nine circles of Hell to save Beatrice but you are also facing the sins of your past. So we needed a guy who was going to have a really dark and checkered past, who had made some really bad choices and commited some terrible sins so that he faces those in each of the nine circles and comes out a better person. It’s not entirely inconsistent with the poem, which starts out (as) a guy is lost in a dark forest and Dante is really using that as a metaphor for having lost his way. He’s confused about his life and Beatrice is there to kind of set him straight.
But we just took the idea to video game extremes and crafted all this dark past for him. It just felt like this third Crusade and the failed seige of Jerusalem and slaughter at Acre, it felt like the right setting for a guy to kind of go astray. There is a lot of morally questionable activity around that historical context and it fit in the theme of the struggle, the Christian mythos of the time and it also helped inform his costume and his back story. So we just went with that. that is the big tweak that the game makes, reimaging his past to motivate him through the game.
Beatrice has a bigger part in the game, too.
Dante never stops mentioning her throughout the book and certainly in parts two and three (of The Divine Comedy, Purgatory and Paradise), which we are not covering in the game, her part gets bigger. but her presence is always felt. she is always the objective of Dante and Virgil. they are on a pilgrimage to get to her. Absolutely, we made her part a bit bigger in the game. Her soul instead of going straight to heaven is kidnapped and pulled down into Hell. We are not quite sure why and that is part of how the plot unfolds. Dante is essentially on a rescue mission to save her and that plot evolves from there and becomes more of a redemption story.
It was important to give her and Lucifer both bigger roles in the video game than in the poem to inject some drama and basically conflict. In the poem, (Lucifer) is trapped in the ninth circle. that is a vision we do deliver in the game but he also is able to project himself as this smoky, inky version of himself up to the surface. Throughout the game, we see this projection of him toying with Dante and taunting him and seducing Beatrice. and when you get to the ninth circle, the more classic version that is pulled straight from the poem is the one that you face. In the poem, (Dante) doesn’t actually see (Lucifer) until the ninth circle and they don’t actually have an exchange in the poem.
There have been some obvious comparisons to the God of War games. What is your comment on that?
We were very specific about definitely being in this genre of melee combat (in which) Devil may Cry preceded God of War. I think the God of War guys were influenced by it. and now Bayonetta is kind of the successor. those are the games that we play and really admire, so we are superflattered by that tcomparison.
What we tried to do differently with this is the focus on the mythology and the narrative and the story and have that be really based around this medieval Christian notion of the afterlife as Dante imagined it. and the combat is very fast-paced. Our guy is a little bit more acrobatic than Kratos. once you get past Death, you will see how the holy and unholy paths evolve. that is sort of our spin on the genre.
Dante is both a savage brutal warrior and you can choose to punish your enemies to finish them off. but he also has a holy streak and you can choose to absolve your enemies, as well, and that choice is a choice you make throughout the game and it really affects the play style — whether the cross is more powerful and whether his magical abilities develop or whether he continues to be kind of a melee-driven guy, cutting people’s heads off and leaning more into the power of the scythe. that kind of dual path nature, still keeping it an action game, it’s not a roleplaying game, it’s not diverging stories, it’s just his fighting style, is it savage? Is it more holy? or is it both? you get to make that choice.
So Dante has a chance to redeem himself and rescue Beatrice in the game, right?
It starts out as a pretty standard rescue mission by a guy who is pretty cocky and arrogant and defiant. his girlfriend has been taken and he is going to break into Hell and kill everybody in his path until he can get his girlfriend back. as he learns about his own responsibility in the events that are unfolding and about the things he has done badly in his life, it changes into a story where it’s more important that he save himself instead of saving Beatrice.
Do you see the game creating interest in the poem?
That is exactly what is going on to a way larger degree than I would have ever anticipated. We are finding that the game is almost this gateway to introducing maybe a new generation to The Divine Comedy and to Dante. Constantly on our Facebook page we’re seeing, ‘Hey I’m reading the poem.’ ‘Hey, where can I find the poem?’ and ‘This has made me interested in learning more about this guy.’ that is a really exciting result of this project.
Dante lovers love it because he’s back in the spotlight and he’s back in the conversation and more people are going to read The Divine comedy because of the game than otherwise would have. because your initial instinct might be that the Dante fans and literary community might be all up in arms about the project but they love the fact that the conversiton has turned toward this guy. that is part of why we did the reprinting on the poem. (Knight penned the introduction to a new Del Rey Books paperback edition of The Inferno released three weeks ago to draw attention to the poem in advance of the game.) some people were like, ‘Oh, it’s (publisher Electronic Arts) trying to cash in on this poem. We’re not making money on that project. It’s not about that but showing we care about the original literature. We take it seriously. you can see the concept art in the insert in the book and see how we were studying what other artists have done in trying to reimagine what Dante has done. We want people to go beyond the game and read it, because it’s a very sophisticated and nuanced piece of literature.
Speaking of which, it is hard to read, with lots of Italian political references. Any advice for readers?
The Longfellow translation, which is the one we published, is the best-known. It’s the most faithful to the Italian structure. He really meticulously tried to replicate the rhyme and the meter and the poetry from the original Italian. There are some prose translations out there as well, where you are going to miss out on the genius of the poetic structure, but if you want to have an easier time grokking what the hell he is talking about there are some prose translations out there that I found very useful. because in making the game I’ve had to go back and read it several times and I don’t think I could have really gotten as much out of it if I hadn’t found that prose translation.
But at the end of the day, I think the poem is going to just mean different things to different people and the more you read it the more you get out of it. some people will read it once and will take away this kind of creepy, dark tale of the nine circles of Hell and these monsters and these sins. I find that young people kind of see it that way, like a Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings and that’s very much how the game looks at it. and then I think as people spend more time with it, they start to see the more spiritual or political or theological elements of it. they will understand it more in a historical context.
Or when they study more about Dante’s life as a politician that ended up on the wrong side of a civil war and how he is kind of using this poem to get back at his enemies and to condemn various members of the church and the pope and bishops he didn’t agree with and his political rivals and so forth, it takes on a much more interesting meaning. It’s as if Dick Cheney wrote this book and he’s casting Barack Obama and all of his people in Hell or vice versa. It has that kind of vibe to it. you can read it entirely in that context. It’s really multilayered. The only advice I could give is the more you are interested, the more you are going to have to give to it and read it and it will give back to you.
Are there plans for more games starring the Dante character?
We don’t have anything to say about that now. It’s really early. We do have some really exciting post-release content, some downloadable content to extend the game we’re going to be talking about very soon. (See our coverage of that here.) I just don’t have anything to give you that now. We are definitely looking to support the game after launch and beyond that we will just have to see how it does.
By Mike Snider
Talking 'Dante's Inferno' with Visceral Games' Jonathan Knight
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February 9th, 2010 at 12:24 pm
That’s where the everyone seems to be at Facebook, With the social media being a hit in the internet community, its no suprise that the game applications are reaching that direction. Its good to see that there pushing for good games to be in mix of things.