“You’ll never get the girl, Dante!”

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Dude they totally made a game out of Dante’s Inferno. Full of that wonderful adolescent horror-movie glee that games seem to be riddled with these days. And while the trailer might seem to be taking some poetic license (sorry), the official website does rather heavily reference the poem itself, including an entire section called “The Poem”, which offers a voiceovered history of the entire Divine Comedy and precis of the poems accompanied by Gustav Doré’s glorious illustrations.

Makes me wonder what other poems are waiting in the wings to be gamified. Paradise Lost seems like a no-brainer for sure. The Ramayana seems like a good choice too (there are already Hanuman and Rama action figures), as does the Mahabarata – lots of good war scenes and mystical warriors in both of them. Gilgamesh is another great heroes-and-monsters dustup that would lend itself to this kind of interpretation, too.

Moving beyond the epics, you could do a good noir-style mystery game based on “Five Bells” where you have to find out what Joe Lynch knew that got him murdered and dumped at the bottom of Sydney Harbour. And there’s plenty of scope for a Grand-Theft-Auto-inspired interpretation of ∏O’s 24 Hours set in and around Melbourne’s old-school Greek and Turkish coffee shops. You choose whether you play the jaded coffee shop owner who’s exhausted by continually having to stop the guys playing cards in the backroom from fighting, the waitress whose boyfriend is just back from prison, the guy trying to get rich selling homegrown chop-chop tobacco, or the poet who sits quietly in the corner taking notes.