As Penny Arcade recently revealed, the video game Dante’s Inferno is getting a novelization… of sorts. Only this “novelization” is the actual 700 year old epic poem using branding and art from the video game.
This is obviously the awesomest thing EVER. Given that incontrovertible fact, what classic piece of literature should also get a modern video game and accompanying branded reprint?
Not really a classic, but how about The Stranger? First part would be GTA style where you go around killing people, and the second part is a court-room drama type game.
Or maybe The Iliad would be better. Although it better have at least 5,000 hours of game time, to stay true to the story.
I’d like to see Tad William’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy put into a game, though that’s hardly ‘classic’ literature.
For the purpose of the thread, how exactly is ‘classic’ literature defined? I don’t know many people that have actually read much ‘classic’ literature to be honest, with the exception of The Hobbit and LOTR if those can be included.
The Odyssey would make a fun RPG or maybe Zelda-ish adventure game. But what I’d really love to see is The Iliad as a Dynasty Warriors type game. Throw in some more classic Greek history and you’ve got a hell of a game. Imagine the Battle of Thermopylae playing as Leonidas. There’s a word for that: Bitchin’. KOEI get on this!
King Arthur (Mort de Arthur I think?), Robin Hood, and Don Quixote would all make good RPG/adventures.
Twenty bucks to anyone that can make a playable game out of Ulysses, though. For that matter, $100 for Finnegan’s Wake. 
(I missed KidScruffy’s mention, but fleshing out the idea is original enough. 
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Slaughterhouse-Five as a classic adventure game in the vein of King’s Quest. Or, if that’s not “classic” enough, The Grapes of Wrath á la Oregon Trail.
Paradise Lost. Just so you can play as the Morningstar and increase the overall outrage factor over games.
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. Candide by Voltaire. Hamlet by Shakespeare. I think all would make good games.
Beowulf.
Penny Arcade got it exactly right, honestly: Imagine Moby Dick as a combination of Sid Meier’s Pirates! for searching and God of War for actually killing the whales.
Well obviously, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and BFG-9000s
All Quiet on the Western Front - a first-person shooter, but you can’t really see who’s shooting at you and your squadmates die basically randomly all around you anyway.
I never played Dynasty Warriors, but if the game is anything like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, that would be an awesome genre for an Iliad game.
Waiting for Godot. If you do nothing, you win.
Crime and Punishment and Lolita.
ETA: Also, Kafka’s The Trial.
The Cask of Amontillado, made with the Dig Dug engine.
My first thought was Hamlet, but I think it would be a very tricky thing.
I think–if you wanted to do it right–it would have to be, like, a cross between an adventure-type and a stealth game. Yes, there is killing, but so little of it is overt. Most of the deaths should be sneak attacks, or the result of clever planning. And the primary goal should be figuring out what’s going on and gathering the evidence to finally act in the open.
If the game company could do that, then it would indeed be kickass.
Heh. There was a long-ago sketch comedy TV show (not SNL, I think, but like it) that ran a fake commercial for the “My Dinner With Andre” video game.
http://www.oberlin.edu/stuorg/OGRE/godothome.htm
There used to be a “Waiting for Godot” interactive fiction that used a Java Appelet. However, it’s no longer around.
A RTK-style strategy set in the classic world would be great. KOEI already did a medieval fantasy and Genghis Khan themed game of the same type back in the SNES days, so it isn’t like they can’t take the same mechanics to a different setting.
The Dynasty Warriors series is somewhat unique, in that you’re one general or officer in an army fighting against the enemy numbering in the 100s to 1000s. The best comparison I can think of is God of War style combat in a giant battlefield with your own army. Maybe you could call it a hack-and-slash game set in the Three Kingdoms era, but seeing a video of the game is probably best.
I believe Koei is making a game from Greek mythology. Their Canadian division is in charge of it, if memory serves me right. Unfortunately, I think it’ll be more Dynasty Warriors (crappy) than Romance Of the Three Kingdoms (good).