Dante's Inferno concept was greenlit immediately

The Dante's Inferno game concept — a totally brutal action-adventure based on Dante Alighieri's epic poem — seems like a hard sell to us, but it was no problem getting EA on board. As it turns out, EA was all in from the very beginning, according to Visceral creative director Jonathan Knight's recollection during a PlayStation Blog interview (that you can watch after the break). He got the go-ahead "pretty much right away," as EA executives apparently saw "the potential in the mythology" glowing green before their very eyes.

"Nobody's really taken on that kind of medieval Christian notion of the afterlife as a very real place that you go to, you know, just under the ground, and there's monsters and demons and rivers," Knight said. "It's just a crazy, fantastical, incredible vision that Dante Alighieri had for Hell, and my execs immediately saw the potential there for a real game."

In addition to the appeal of Hell — a concept that "everybody has some knowledge of" — we can imagine that EA appreciated what is basically a licensed game based on a public domain property, especially these days.
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