Abstract
ABSTRACT In 2010, the world’s fourth-largest gaming company, Electronic Arts, released an action-adventure video game called Dante’s Inferno. In the game, a weaponised, crusader Dante hacks and slashes his way through nine infernal circles to rescue his Beatrice, held captive by Satan in the pit of Hell. The game has sold a million copies, rates in the top quartile at review site Metacritic, and is critically acclaimed for its visual design. Dante scholarship, by contrast, has largely registered incredulity. This article takes the example of recent digital remediations of Inferno as a basis to explore what constitutes a ‘faithful’ remediation of Dante’s poem, and why; asking questions such as: How do we evaluate the effects of the original text; that is, what it ‘is’ or ‘does’? What conventions and mechanics of the original medium does the artefact depend upon? How can the effects invited or facilitated by one medium be translated into another? And: What constitutes ‘fidelity’ to the original work?
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