The Artistry of Hell

A convergence of literary genius and 21st century technology

In the first issue of This Is The Order, we featured a pair of young artists re-imagining Dante Alghieri’s epic journey through the three realms of the dead. ‘The Divine Comedy’ is a true literary colossus, so vast in scope that few would dare attempt recreate it today...

"Birk and Sanders showed a dystopian California"

But Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders did it last year with a book that held up the the first stage of Dante’s voyage, Inferno - his route through hell - as a tweaked mirror to their own familiar world. It showed a dystopian California engulfed in what can only be called pure Armageddon - an infernal landscape of traffic jams, collapsed bridges, smouldering rivers, sulphurous sunsets and fire. Lots of fire. Now EA - behemoths of the video game - plan to bring Inferno to the gaming community. How will they fare? Well, if a recently released trailer created by design studio Psyop is anything to go by, pretty damn well.

The trailer itself is a work of art. This, you can well imagine, is what it must be like to journey through the nine circles of hell - through the darkest realm of hostility and heat - as Dante does in Inferno. It’s brutal down there. This convergence of literary genius and 21st Century talent certainly bodes well for the game.