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Dante's Inferno screenshot

Some people refuse to like Visceral Game's Dante's Inferno. Why? Because it's based on one of the greatest works of world literature: The Divine Comedy. For critics, it's an abomination; a shameless exploitation of a 700-year-old Christian classic. But for others, it's just a promising third-person action game. Here, in an interview with VideoGamer.com, executive producer Jonathan Knight responds with an impassioned defence of the controversial hack 'n' slash. Knight reckons Dante's Inferno's critics just don't get it. Read on to find out why.

VideoGamer.com: How are you innovating in the genre? What are you doing that's never been done before?

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Jonathan Knight: The number one thing we're doing has to do with the story and the mythology. No-one has tackled the medieval Christian afterlife. What we wanted to do with the game was first and foremost take you into Dante Alighieri's vision of hell. To do our best job to take a piece of literature that's well known and, even if you haven't read it, it's somehow in your DNA - the nine Circles of Hell, the Divine Comedy - and do our best to adapt that to this medium. That means taking some liberties obviously, with the story and whatnot, and making it more action-oriented than the poem was, but also trying to be literal and true to his vision of the geography of hell and the world he created - the characters, the monsters, the Dante Beatrice story and so forth. A lot of games have borrowed from mythology here and there or dealt in super fantasy worlds, but we're trying to tell this medieval poem and adapt it for the medium.

In terms of gameplay, we're pushing a lot of exciting features. The ability to take control of these giant demons - it's almost like vehicles in hell, if you will, and there's a lot of that in the game. And the duality of the character, and opening up the upgrades. I don't want to call it an RPG by any stretch of the imagination, but a lot of games in the genre have been linear in the way you're allowed to upgrade your character. We try to bust that wide open. There are about 60 different upgrades throughout the game. They're wide open to you. You choose if you're going to invest more heavily in magic or in the relics or in your health and mana bars or your cross powers or your sight powers. We just want to give a lot of choice there. The game has a holy path and an unholy path. Some people like to fight with the cross, some like to fight with sight, some like to use magic. What we find with these games is different people play in different ways, and we want to give you that freedom to invest in whatever your play style is.

VideoGamer.com: When the game was announced, I thought the online reaction from gamers was interesting. Did the development team look at it, or did you try to ignore it?

JK: Yeah absolutely. We obviously want people to know about the game and want them to eventually buy it. But the other reason we're out there all the time, and we were out so early was to get people's feedback and see what their reaction was going to be. Game development's highly iterative. I've been taking the game to focus tests since it was about six months old and didn't have any art in it. Great games are made through a continual process of feedback. We're always reading what people say and testing the game and testing the ideas and folding that feedback into our ongoing development. That doesn't mean we're straying from the core vision or anything. Obviously the game's not going to be for everybody. You can't make everybody happy. But absolutely, yeah, always reading it and always folding that into our thinking.

VideoGamer.com: Are the critics who are concerned with what you're doing with the poem missing the point?

JK: I think they are. 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. 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'll cite a couple of examples. We've got a rare bookseller we work with. She has a collection of Dante books going back to the early 1800s, rare editions. There's some cool stuff from the early twentieth century. Literally, there's a Disney comic book with Mickey and Goofey as Dante and Virgil. There are trading cards, postcards, tourist items. People in England would go to Italy and come back with these tourist posters based on The Divine Comedy - this is the beginning of the twentieth century. She's got an amazing collection. She used to teach Dante as a schoolteacher. She's just super excited about the project. I added somebody on Facebook the other day, who said his Oxford professor told him about the video game and that's how he found out about it, even though he's a kid. I've had other schoolteachers reach out to me and even thank us for doing it.

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.

VideoGamer.com: Is there confusion about the text itself? Do some think it's a religious historical account like The Bible?

JK: There might be. If there is that confusion it's simply from not knowing the facts about it. It's always been a work of fiction, for seven hundred years. There's never been any legitimate or official position from anyone otherwise. The Catholic Church has always regarded it as a work of fiction from day one. And it is. It's a fantasy. It's basically Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings. It does hit a little closer to religion, in the sense that it is a medieval Christian mythology. But if you read it, it's a mishmash of ancient mythologies, with Christian mythologies, with Catholicism, with Italian folklore. It's also highly political. Dante was casting a bunch of his political enemies into hell, and then meeting there and talking to them. So there's a lot of contemporary politics involved. It's an incredible mishmash. But the one thing it definitely is, is fantasy. That's without question. If people throughout the centuries came to believe in Dante's vision of hell, it's equivalent to people believing in Middle Earth. I'm not saying you shouldn't believe in heaven or hell. It's just that his particular vision of it is quite clearly a crazy fantasy. That's what we focus on for the game.

When we announced the project in Florence at the beginning of the year we came over to Europe. We definitely gave a lot of the first looks of things to Europe, because it's a little bit more of a European darling, frankly. So we came to Florence. I did a little Power Point. I said, hey, here's the Nine Circles of Hell, here's the importance of this book and the Dante Beatrice story, which is an amazing story - not just the fictional story but their real life story. And then we tried to theme the marketing campaign around the Nine Circles of Hell and make people see that's how Dante ordered hell, that's how he structured it, and it is a big fantasy. Maybe we haven't done a good enough job of explaining all that but that's the approach we took.

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