Four major studios are fighting for the rights for the as yet unreleased Electronic Arts game based on brimstone-heavy literary work, Dante's Inferno.
Battling each other through the rings of hell are Universal, Paramount, New Regency and MGM. Who will survive the trials and scoop the title we can't say but Universal may have an edge, having just closed a deal to bring another EA game, Army Of Two, (a story about masked mercenaries Rios and Salem and a whole lotta bullets) to the screen. Paramount, on the other hand, has jumped into video game publishing directly, looking to capitalise on the massive success of the games market as the credit crunch looms over box offices everywhere.
Inferno is the first part of Dante's epic poem The Divine Comedy, written in the 1300s. It's a tale of the poet's journey through hell, the complete work being split into three sections, each dealing with a different area of the afterlife. All of which sounds a great deal like id software's classic Doom to us. Dante: Knee Deep In The Dead, pitting a fourteenth century Italian poet against the cyberdemon. Now that's something we'd pay to see.
Whatever form the title takes, we can expect some kind of screen incarnation towards the end of next year. Bring it on!