We talk to Visceral Games' Jonathan Knight about what it's like making a videogame based on a poem

NowGamer: What benefits are there from looking to literature for inspiration when designing a videogame?
Jonathan Knight: Well I think it’s up to individual writers and developers, but for me, I really wanted to base a game on some well-known material, so that our audience would have a shared collective consciousness about it. There is great power in some of the legends, myths, and literature of the past. Things that have stood the test of time are obviously worth looking at again and again, and that was something we wanted to achieve with Dante’s Inferno: a fresh take on a classic. It gave the project a clear framework, and allowed us to make rapid progress early on.

Is it reflective of the industries move towards more complex characters and stories, the sort usually associated with literature?
Hard to say. We ended up making some basic changes to the story and characters (particularly to Dante, the hero) in order to adapt it to the video game medium, and in many ways, we’ve had to simplify the message of the original literature in order to make an entertaining game. So I don’t think games are becoming literature, or that they will. What worked for us about Dante’s Inferno was that the author (Dante Alighieri) spent many years synthesizing a vision of Hell that was incredibly imaginative, comprehensive, and detailed. And we were able to leverage that imagination into an interactive action/adventure, by bringing his specific world to life. There are many authors who have done the same thing—i.e., created whole worlds. Tolkein is probably the best recent example. And of those, there are probably many whose works could similarly be brought to life in a game. But that doesn’t mean all literature is headed that way.

Do you think games do a good job of portraying and replicating the narratives and characters found in literature or is there something lost in translation? What do games add to literature?
There is always something lost in translation from one medium to another. Games obviously have a very different pacing than literature, they’re interactive, and so forth. Most importantly, in a game the player assumes the role of the hero, and so the paradigm changes for what makes a “good” hero. For instance, in Dante’s Inferno, we were able to portray a hero with a terrible moral compass, someone you probably wouldn’t root for in a movie. But since the player assumes that character, and wants to kill those demons and press on, we can get away with that. It’s a bit experimental and risky, crafting such a depraved hero, but it could only be done in a game.

How do you start translating something like a novel into game form, what makes certain literature more suitable for translation, other than the obvious guns and fighting gameplay?
As mentioned, there are a few select works that, in my opinion, succeed in crafting an entire universe of environments, characters and themes that are cohesive and believable as a real place, a real time. Middle Earth, Dante’s Inferno, Star Wars, etc. Those are the stories that I think make for good games, because they are more than stories, they are worlds. Worlds with rules, structure, and histories. That’s what jumped out at us with The Divine Comedy.

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