Everything old is new again…

Earlier this year, Electronic Arts announced they would be adapting Inferno into a video game. Inferno is the first part in a larger work called The Divine Comedy, written by medieval Italian poet Durante degli Alighieri, more commonly known as Dante. The tale is of a middle aged man who became apathetic about his life, and during a lonesome sojourn, he somehow slipped into a guided tour of the Christian afterlife, the first stop being Hell.

Frankly, the story, while historically significant, is terribly dry and lacks any kind of intrigue or the necessary action that would make for a popular video game or any video game for that matter. So, what did Electronic Arts do? They only loosely adapted the story, infused it heavily with God of War style gameplay and turned the dreadfully boring protagonist into a knight searching for his lost girlfriend.

This stirs the imagination. If Electronic Arts can adapt the most famous part of The Divine Comedy into a game by playing fast and loose with the story, what other notable stories of old can be brought into this modern entertainment medium? What ancient tales are best suited, and conversely, which would require a fresh coat of paint? In this three part feature, stories from ages past will be put under the critical eye of the gamers to see which could potentially be adapted into interactive media.

Note: To be considered for this article, stories had to be at least 400 years old. Though, most herein will be considerably older.

The Iliad by Homer (Approximately 600 – 700 B.C.)

One of the earliest written stories in western civilization, The Iliad is a large, sprawling, epic poem. Scholars suggest that the tale was woven long before Homer through the oral traditions of antiquity, and even more suggest that there was no such person as Homer and that he is as much myth as the stories attributed to him. Yes, Homer was such an amazing author that he didn’t even need corporeal form. Take that, writers who actually existed!

Regardless of the origins of the tale or the author, The Iliad provides a fantastic story steeped in Greek mythology. It takes place during the mythical Trojan War, specifically the final weeks of the conflict. The Greeks decided it would be a wizzbang of an idea to sack the city of Chryse, which was allied with the Trojans. Furthermore, Agamemnon and Achilles, the Greek leader and their best warrior respectively, took two women as spoils of war. Agamemnon took Chryseis, and Achilles took Briseis. How’s that for a pickup line?

Achilles: You must be tired, girl.
Briseis: Really? Why?
Achilles: Because you’ve been running through my mind all day. Also, I murdered everyone you have ever known and loved.

Agamemnon learned that Chryseis was the source of a plague. (Like all women. Am I right, guys?) So, he gave her up and demanded Briseis from Achilles. Furious that Agamemnon was cruising his woman, Achilles went AWOL and refused to fight in the war any longer. Zeus, god of thunder and awesome beards, sided with the Trojans, further compounding the troubles of the Greek army.

Sounds like a good set-up for a video game, eh? Honestly, everything detailed in the early part of The Illiad could be the opening cut scene, perhaps told by famed video game actor Simon Templeton, voice of Kain from the Legacy of Kain series. From there, it would be best for the adaptation of The Iliad to skew drastically from the source material. There is a staggering amount of philosophical musing and family lineage discussions that have no part in a video game.

The Iliad could be less about the spat between Agamemnon and Achilles and more about wrecking ungodly havoc in the Trojan War itself. Due to its wartime setting, The Iliad would perhaps function best as a real-time strategy game in the same vein as Command & Conquer or Starcraft. The player would assume the role of a Greek or Trojan leader, watching from on high and commanding his armies. As Greek gods play prominently in the Trojan War myths, calling upon a deity to act as a kind of superweapon would be possible. A thunderbolt from Zeus sure beats the pants off a Zerg rush.

A problem: How to incorporate the Trojan Horse into the game? Of course, the Trojan Horse is actually a product of The Aeneid, but gamers will undoubtedly want to see it utilized in this Trojan War adaptation. Unfortunately, as the Trojan Horse is the oldest trick in the book — no, really, it’s literally ancient — who is going to fall for this ruse? Maybe the A.I. will if it is programmed to know nothing of Greek myth but certainly not a second player. The gamer playing The Iliad will have to choose mere children in online mulitplayer to find someone to accept the horse into his fortress. Beware Greeks bearing gifts, kids.

Le Mort d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory (1485 A.D.)

There should an asterisk next to virtually everything written above. Le Mort d’Arthur is translated as “The Death of Arthur.” In fact, Mallory did not want that to be the title, but his intentions were misinterpreted by the editor who used the name of the last chapter as the book’s title. Imagine a movie called He Dies at the End and see how well it does at the box office.

Also, although the stories are generally credited to Sir Thomas Mallory, much of it was compiled from previous sources. Finally, as many of the stories pre-date Thomas Mallory’s work and many of which even pre-date Mallory’s birth, to say these stories truly originated from 1485 is at best misleading.

Le Mort d’Arthur is actually not only the tale of the mythical King Arthur’s death but a vast compilation of legends surrounding King Arthur, his knights, his family, his knights’ families, his friends, his knights’ friends, and his knights’ families’ friends. It is, put simply, ludicrously oversized. It may be best to adapt this into a video game to experience it because readers of the book have been known to have been sucked into its gravitational pull. If Le Mort d’Arthur were to be adapted into a game, it would serve the player best by having the sections cataloguing Arthur’s birth and maturation as a tutorial for what could only be a highly complex RPG. Not only do the swords and sorcery lend itself to Japanese RPG’s like Final Fantasy and western RPG’s like Fable, but the long, winding story fits that particular genre as well. Nobody would want to play Le Mort d’Arthur: THE FIGHTING GAME.

Arthurian video games are not unprecedented, but they are not typically done with such grandeur as the comprehensive tale of Le Mort d’Arthur. Even if the developers were to cut significant portions of the story, this would certainly be a double disc game. Much of Le Mort d’Arthur contains the individual quests of certain prominent knights, but to keep this as a standard turn-based team battle RPG, some tales would have to be altered to be group quests and not personal excursions. Otherwise, by the time the player is done leveling up Sir Gareth, the knight would be largely unused later if the developers created a faithful adaptation. He is an important character in one story but not for the remainder of Le Mort d’Arthur.

It would make sense for the section on the quest for the Holy Grail to be the central theme as the concept is easily recognizable to many American gamers. Morgan le Fey and Mordred could serve as primary antagonists. Morgan may be best used in ridiculous JRPG style scantily-clad clothing. Mordred should no longer be a man but a seventy-foot monster. Indeed, all games should have an enormous goliath to bring down, as it gives the player a sense of accomplishment as he smiles at a job well done and licks the Cheetos off his fingers. Le Mort d’Arthur would be a sickeningly long 60+ hour RPG. With $60 – $70 games that have five to six hour single player missions these days, I think the gaming community deserves a long one here and there. What better source material for a lengthy game is there?

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO…