Everyone Will Burn: Dante's Interview

In-depth chat with executive producer, industry veteran Jonathan Knight, who reveals what makes Dante's Inferno hot - and what he committed to on "day one of the project".

Page: 1  2  3 

Page 3

Kikizo: Shame Dante's royalties have expired. You've had to build Hell from scratch - can you tell us a bit about the process?

Knight: Well that's one of the most rewarding things about the game, the most creative part of the process for me. What are these Nine Circles of Hell going to be? We know what they're called - Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud and Treachery - and from the poem we have fairly intricate descriptions of the geography, the people that are there, the guardians, the monsters, the major landmarks. Some Circles are more descriptive than others.

And so we start with that. And then we also look at what's been done throughout the centuries. There's a French illustrator from the 19th century named Gustave Doré who did a series of about 300 black and white illustrations - he also did Paradise Lost, there are a number of these books he brought to life with his illustrations - so we have those and they're a great inspiration.

There's been a lot of other artists - William Blake did a whole series on the Inferno, and there's Wayne Barlow, who's a 20th century artist. He's alive today and working in Hollywood, and I called him up and he has done a lot of the concepts of the game for us, and he did a whole series of paintings called Barlow's Inferno. So we have the descriptions in the poems, and then we have this pretty healthy body of art going all the way through medieval times, the Renaissance, to the 20th century. So we look at that and then we think "how do we want to put our own spin on it?"

We've done a lot of research on angels and demons that's not necessarily in the poem, kind of living outside the poem, to round that out. So there's a lot of thought that's gone into what the demons look like. You've just seen the first layer of the demons, there are going to be more advanced classes as you go through.

And then of course we try to theme enemy characters and bosses after the Sins of those levels, and that's been pretty fun - to take a concept like Lust and a concept like Heresy and try to embody that in a character or an enemy. And then all the environments are going to be very unique, in terms of the weather effects and the textures and the way people are being punished there.

So it's a big, big challenge - nobody's ever been to Hell and come back to tell us what it's like. It's immediately a great idea that very quickly becomes pretty complicated. Because we don't want to let people down by having it be too tame and timid, we don't want to gross anyone out by making it so horrific that you don't want to be there. So it's a challenge, but we're having a great time doing it.

Kikizo: We're not sure "wanting to be there" is the point of Hell.

Knight: [laughs] Well, one way you do that is you give them a great goal, which is to rescue a beautiful woman. And you also make them incredibly powerful, which we've done with Dante - we've set him up so that he kills Death in the opening scenes of the game and steals his very, very powerful soul-reaping scythe. And then he's got the cross which his girlfriend gave to him before he went off to the wars, and it has holy power in Hell. So he's powerful, and even though he might be up against a terrible place, you've got control the whole time.

Kikizo: Thanks for talking to us.

Dante's Inferno will erupt worldwide on PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable and Xbox 360 next year.

Page: 1  2  3 

MORE INTERVIEWS >>