Video games are an inherently four-dimensional medium. They happen over objective time, we experience them in subjective time, and they structure their own internal sense of time. Movement - or our displacment in space over time - largely defines how we experience their spatial structure.
L'Inferno. Francesco Bertolini (dir), 1911.
Bertolini's silent feature L'Inferno was the first motion-based work to depict Dante's Inferno. It combines the static camera and staging conventions typical of early film with various special effects. This adaptation of the Commedia's most famous cantiche also draws heavily upon the engravings of Gustave Doré in its scene composition.
Denton Designs' 1986 title Dante's Inferno takes a literal interpretation of the Inferno. This 2D scrolling game for the Commodore 64 personal computer system follows the narrative of Dante's poem as well as using its geography as the game world. The player takes on the role of the Pilgrim and must travel alone through the nine circles of Hell within seven game days. The way is filled with peril and hostile creatures, and the player has only one life (unlike the conventional three lives common to the genre). The game's notorious difficulty also comes from there being no save points in the original release.
Although the seminal first-person shooter Doom takes place on Mars and its moons, Dante's influence on the game is clear. The player begins at ground level, similar to the wilderness where Dante first encounters Virgil (as well as the beasts that barred his path). The player blasts through waves of demons and other infernal creatures while progressing downward through the levels, which grow increasingly monstrous. The climax takes place in Hell, in the game's final episode "Inferno." Should the player defeat the final boss, a doorway opens that returns the player to Earth. This recalls the narrative and spatial structure of the Commedia, whereby Dante and Virgil escape the Pit to return to the surface of Earth and the hope of spiritual salvation.
The Lost.Crave Entertainment (pub), Irrational Games(dev), 2002 (unreleased).
This third person shooter/survival horror game began as a AAA title for Playstation2. The game underwent multiple revisions, the last as a budget title, before being cancelled in 2002 due to the developers' legal and financial difficulties. (The game was complete, and Indian developer FXLabs purchased and released it in India as a PC game under the title Agni: Queen of Darkness.)
The Lost's narrative deviates significantly from Dante's text, replacing the Pilgrim's journey with a single-mother's quest to recover the soul of her dead child, Beatrice, from the grasp of Hell. The representation of the characters and environments of the Inferno also veers away from the original text.
The "modernization" of Dante's underworld in The Lost recalls the poet's own strategy of filling the Inferno with the souls of his contemporaries. In Dante's case, this made his poem immediately relevant to his audience. The Lost attempts to connect with its gamer audience by replacing elements of Inferno with set pieces from the survival horror genre while retaining the structure and narrative of Dante's underworld.
Devil May Cry.Capcom (pub, dev), 2001.
Capcom's best-selling Devil May Cry franchise (2001-2008) uses the Inferno as part of a larger body of chthonic material that supports the game?s narrative and environmental structure. The original game in the flagship series established the new genre of "extreme action," in which fast-paced twitch response dominates the gameplay in a frenetic barrage of fluid movement and violence. The protagonist, Dante, and his twin brother and antagonist, Virgil, are half-human, half-demon. Dante thrives on challenge and repeatedly travels to chthonic places to combat demonic forces intent on destroying humanity for the sake of power.
Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne takes place in an underworld that temporarily replaces the material world following an apocalypse. The liminality of the player character is expressed in corporeal terms, as he has become part demon as part of this transition. The gameplay of this RPG consists of negotiating with demons as well as fighting, a device that recalls underworld descent narratives like Orpheus' petition to Persephone for the release of Eurydice.
SMT:N also features an extended cameo by Devil May Cry's Dante, who apears as a character whom the player can recruit into the party. His ambiguous role in the game positions him closer to psychopomp than pilgrim. Similarly, the play styles of the DMC series and SMT:N are radically different; while both deal with underworld themes and contexts, the ritualized turn-based combat of SMT:N encourages a more reflective gaming experience than the frenzied pace of DMC's real-time encounters.
A mulitude of chthonic and other mythological figures populate SMT:N's world. The axial construction of spatial meaning re-appears, most notably in the Labyrinth of Amala, where Lucifer abides in its lowest depths in the guise of a mysterious, wheelchair-bound old man.
