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Literary Classics To Video Games

From Wired magazine:

Dante’s Inferno proves it: Classic literature is a videogame gold mine.

Now that Electronic Arts is finished reimagining Dante Alighieri’s epic poem as an Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 adventure through the circles of hell, the development team’s going to need to find inspiration in other classic literary works.

Game|Life would like to humbly suggest 10 more books that would make totally kick-ass games.

For those of you with a deep affection for the classics, it’s probably best you don’t read their list. It’s full of new scenarios. “Players command an army of Lilliputians and confront the giants of Brobdingnag” for the game version of Gulliver’s Travels.

Personally, I look forward to the improved version of Middlemarch where Dorothea Brooke instead shuns Casaubon overtures, and opts for the life on the high seas fighting skeletal pirates thus saving us 400 pages of The Painfully Obvious.

It could have happened.

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11
Feb 2010
AUTHOR Mark Newton
CATEGORY

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COMMENTS 11 Comments
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  • http://www.samsykes.com Sam Sykes

    Adam Roberts already wrote that.

  • Simon

    He did it that.

    But what a fantastic idea for a game.

    (Who am I kidding – I’m crap at all computer games. If I tried to command lilliputians aganst brobdingnagians my lilliputians would mutiny and kill me. From the inside . . . )

  • Alex Carnegie

    Dante’s Inferno looks like it’ll do for Dante what God of War did for Greek mythology…

    Looks fun but I fear it’ll not do a great deal to counter the popular perception of videogames as mindless lowbrow entertainment, although it IS a ‘re-imagining’ rather than an attempt at straight-up adaptation. I reckon the best attempt at that I’ve ever seen is still probably The Hobbit for the ZX Spectrum.

    Continuing on similarly bathetic lines btw: how about a re-imagining of A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man using the Grand Theft Auto 4 engine? Or, better yet, a 2D platform game?

  • http://www.sambeaven.com/ Sam Beaven

    The really interesting thing about the Dante’s Inferno game is that they’ve re-released the book, repackaged with the new Dante’s likeness: http://kotaku.com/5445824/dantes-inferno-the-official-novelization-of-the-book

    I can imagine there will be an awful lot of disappointed teenagers as a consequence. Or maybe not…

  • http://www.twitter.com/george_stirling George Stirling

    A younger version of me once spent far too long playing Cryo’s Dune game. I was just a bit confused when I read the book a few years later. The plots diverge after about chapter four.

  • http://scotspec.blogspot.com N. R. Alexander

    Funny you mention it. I had a late, late night finishing Dante’s Inferno last night – what? It was fun!

    Ah, I make no apologies. I’d have let the unbaptised babies be myself, but they kept coming at me with scythes!

    Still, for all the marketing, the game itself really has precious little to do with Dante. And I’m all for repurposing classic literature from the public domain for games. At least that way there’s a better chance of some decent narrative. Not that, that said, Dante’s Inferno managed that very well at all.

  • http://blog.markcnewton.com Mark C Newton

    I think it raises an interesting point. Does making a game of a classic ever raise interest in that book? I’d guess, yes, to some extent.

    Sure, it’s severely tampering with an established, perhaps iconic work, but if that brings it to the attention of a wider audience (and perhaps converts some to that classic) is that bad? Yes and no.

    It’s certainly no worse than a Hollywood butchering of a certain title, and the game medium is very different, so the narrative is forced to change…

    I’d be intrigued to see more, though. (Although, Sam, that cover is a totally bizarre image.)

  • Neil P

    I used to love the zx spectrum Hobbit and possibly more so the LOTR game. It was great, after struggling to get through a door for half an hour i could then order sam to kill merry and pippin and he would (woe betide me if i dared attack Sam though). I also liked to tell Sam to “piss off” to which the game would reply, “Sam can’t see any fissures”. I was only 8 years old at the time….

    Part of me is surprised it has taken so long to adapt “Dante’s inferno” into a game. It’s got the levels built in already and demons/torture is always good fun.

  • http://hampshireflyer.wordpress.com hampshireflyer

    Now the Aeneid might as well have been a video game already. Go here, go there, rescue this character, that overlong cut scene all about that shield…

  • http://blog.markcnewton.com Mark C Newton

    Neil/Alex – you know, I’ve not even seen screen shots of that Spectrum game. I’m off to google now…

    Hampshire, thanks for stopping by. Actually, yeah, when you put it like that… I suspect the Iliad would also make good game fodder.

  • http://enjai-pearson.livejournal.com/ Neil P

    try this mark it’s a site with zx spectrum emulators http://www.zxspectrum.net/

    LOTR is on there. It turns out i got my curse mixed up and when i tell sam to “F%$k off” he replies, “there are no furnishings to take off”. That’s my weekend down the drain.