Your RDA of Irony

Saturday Sundry

Since last January, “Dante’s Inferno” has been available as a video game.  https://finermanworks.com/your_rda_of_irony/2010/01/31/eugenes-inferno/

I don’t know if the designers are planning sequels.  Dante did, and it would be fun watching his avatar  in “Il Paradiso” duel with a three-headed ninja form of the Trinity.

But I am disappointed that other major works of literature have not been adapted to X-Box or Wii.

Anna Karenina” would be exciting.  I imagine it like Pac-Man: our heroine devouring young bachelors while being pursued by a curmudgeonly husband and divorce lawyers?  Perhaps she could be an action figure like Lara Croft, derailing marriages and trains.

But why let Tolstoy get all the royalties.  Let’s see what we can earn for Ted Dostoyevsky.  In the video game of “Crime and Punishment” the pawnbroker is  trained in the martial arts! And each pawnbroker–Rodya will have a limitless number to kill–becomes progressively more difficult to slay.  Furthermore, each saintly prostitute–Rodya will have a limitless number of them, too–will be progressively more difficult to save.

Dickens is perfectly adaptable for games.  Most of his plots are already labyrinths for the reader.  In “A Tale of Two Cities” why should Sydney Carton go meekly to the guillotine?  Let him take on the population of Paris.  (He could be avenging countless American tourists.)

And if any of these games are successful, then we can adapt them into movies.

 

  1. Michael Gury says:

    Dear Eugene, you may have something here. Not that we need to translate all of literature into video games, but in print mode guys like Mr. Milton and Mr. Wordsworth just make kids glaze over like a good sniff of glue. Imagine the Lake Country as a battlefield with aliens! Paradise Lost of course has all the makings of a true action adventure. Actually, with Milton’s tome (and a half), I’d go straight to the mini-series. Dennis Hopper is dead, but the unholy combination of Keanu Reeves, Angelina Jolie and the ubiquitous Anthony Hopkins could provide the star-power needed to get this green-lit and scheduled for instant entombment somewhere around 2014. We could throw in Lindsay Lohan to dispatch this turkey faster than a flying bullet. Meantime we can work on the video game and have huge theological arguments in front of a bunch of kids in black tee shirts sitting in front of computers charged with the responsibility of creating a video game worthy of Grand Theft Auto.

    Regards, Michael

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