Public Hath No Fury for Hellish New Video Game

(Feb. 8) -- Video game giant Electronic Arts aired its first Super Bowl ad Sunday, a 30-second spot featuring a crusader battling demons set against Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine." The game advertised was "Dante's Inferno," a new hack-and-slash title based on the 14th-century poem. The ad closed with the words "Hell Awaits."

That wasn't always the text, however. EA had previously submitted a version of the ad featuring the tag line "Go to Hell," which CBS rejected -- the sort of censorship many video games have seen before. Games like "Manhunt," "Grand Theft Auto" and "Soldier of Fortune" have attracted protest in the past, and the new game's melding of grotesque violence with religious imagery seemed to be a potentially troublesome mixture. Aside from a few minor troubles like changing two words in the Super Bowl ad, however, now that the game has been released, "Dante's Inferno" is notable not for controversy but for a lack of it.

"The Divine Comedy" may not seem like the best source material for a video game. The passive poet Dante Alighieri did not provide a believable hero, but EA has buffed him up into a scythe-wielding crusader with a crucifix stitched into his bare chest. The nine circles of hell are set up like levels in a standard game, complete with their respective "boss" characters and the big enemy at the end.

Executive Producer Jonathan Knight acknowledges that the game doesn't pretend to emulate classic literature. "We're making a piece of entertainment, so we didn't dive into great questions of theology and philosophy the way Dante did," he said.

In addition to using Dante's text as the game's narrative framework, the EA teams based much of the visuals on works by artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Auguste Rodin and Gustave Dore.

Controversy can be a powerful marketing tool when deployed properly, and early on in the game's development EA seemed to be angling to stir a bit of trouble with their gruesome take on Christian mythology. It appeared they had succeeded when a group of protesters were seen waving signs outside the June Electronic Entertainment Expo -- until it was revealed that the protest was a hoax staged by EA.

Christian activists never participated in an organized protest of the game itself, only of EA's depiction of religious fanatics. While developer Visceral Games didn't skimp on hellish visuals -- featuring a giant nude "Lust" that spews malformed babies from its nipples, ropes made of human corpses and monsters that fire genitalia projectiles -- the over-the-top depictions of hell have not touched a chord with the public in the same way as the gleeful, anarchic savagery of the "Grand Theft Auto" series, two of which were banned in Australia. The only formal call to boycott "Dante's Inferno" came from the International Nanny Association for the "Bad Nanny" award players can receive from killing unbaptized infants.

"Dante's Inferno" was released Friday to mixed reviews. Many critics faulted the game for attempting to clone the popular "God of War" series, a Greek-mythology-based game whose third installment will come out next month.

While there are two more sections in Dante's "The Divine Comedy," Visceral Games is considering a prequel rather than a sequel for the next installment in the series -- possibly because "Dante's Purgatory" could get a little boring.