We speak to creative director Jonathan Knight about EA's hellish new game, Dante's Inferno

What came first, the idea to adapt The Divine Comedy or the genre of game you wanted to work on next after Dead Space?
Well, I really do think it was pretty much both at the same time. Maybe the genre came slightly first in the sense that I wanted to do an action-adventure brutal fighting game and I wanted to do it in the afterlife. And not just any afterlife, but a very specifically medieval, Christian afterlife. I really like the idea of a guy breaking into hell and fighting his way through hell. We thought at first that we’d be pulling from a lot of different sources, but Dante Alighieri is the definitive source if you really want to know what the medieval mind thought and what the medieval mind thought the medieval afterlife would be like. He’s sort of the number one European source and so really very quickly in the research my memory was refreshed about The Divine Comedy, I re-read it and I was like, ‘You know what, let’s do a videogame based on Inferno Part 1 of The Divine Comedy’ and so we were off and running. So it was really pretty much the same time and I’d say the genre maybe slightly anticipated that and so then it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s do that, but there’s not a really a strong fighting element to The Divine Comedy.’ So the next impulse was, how do we adapt the poem and bring a fresh take to the story so that we can give the character a reason to be fighting? Like, ‘Why’s he fighting? Well, he’s fighting because he’s not just trying to get to [his fiancée] Beatrice, he’s not just trying to walk to her through the afterlife, he’s actually trying to rescue her because she’s been taken or kidnapped and Lucifer is trying to prevent you from getting to her’ and so we had to craft a little bit of a new story that sits on the basic idea of the poem.

… continued