No plans are set in stone, but if it was up to a producer at Visceral Games, he would make a Dante’s Purgatory.
Ever since Dante’s Inferno was announced, I wondered if Visceral would continue with the rest of the plot of the Divine Comedy. The epic poem by Dante Alighieri is actually told in three parts, only the first of which deals with Hell while the other two has Dante travelling to Purgatory and then Heaven. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a videogame trilogy that featured each location? It seems that I wasn’t the only one with that notion. I asked producer Zach Mumbach about his plans for a sequel and he said that if it was up to him, he’d make it in a heartbeat.
“I’d like to. It’s up in the air, I think,” Mumbach said at New York Comic Con. “It’s tricky because the Inferno was such a cool environment. Hell sort of sells itself. When you start talking about Purgatory and Paradise, it’s like, where do you go [with that?]”
But luckily there is a lot fo great source material to draw from. “Dante, just like the Inferno, has a very specific description of his Purgatory. It’s obviously not nearly as horrific as his descriptions of Hell. You’d have to add a lot more.”
Without getting too spoilerific, the ending of Visceral’s Dante’s Inferno definitely left the door open for them to make a sequel. “That was the idea. Let’s make sure we leave this sorta open to follow with it if we wanted to.”
Ultimately though, Mumbach said the decision isn’t his to make. “I don’t make those decisions, I just make videogames. I make what they tell me to make,” Mumbach said. I don’t know if it’s his bosses at Visceral that will give the greenlight on that project or if it needs an OK from the publisher EA.
But I do know that Mumbach himself is interested and has already given thought to how a Dante’s Purgatory could be done. “It would be easy enough to come up with a plot. We’ll see,” Mumbach said with a smile. “If it was up to me, I’d do it.”
It would certainly be interesting to see a videogame set in such a different setting like Purgatory so let’s hope that Mumbach gets his wish.
