Last June, a small group gathered outside the E3 Expo, the electronic entertainment conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center, to protest Dante’s Inferno, a video game based on the 14th-century poem about the underworld. They held signs like “EA = Electronic Anti-Christ,” referring to Electronic Arts, maker of the video game. Other signage included “Play Dante’s Inferno, Go to Hell” and the assonant “Trade in your PlayStation for a pray station.”

The Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly reported on the protest; the blogger for The Times said the 13 protesters “came from a church in Ventura County” and handed out a brochure warning: “Only God Can Judge. And he will not judge the sinners who play this game kindly.”

But as both papers soon reported, the protest was a hoax, cooked up by EA’s marketers to feed interest in Dante’s Inferno. The protest was the beginning of a nine-month promotional plan that did not end until after the game went on sale Feb. 9. (It was reviewed in The New York Times, unenthusiastically, the day before.)And now that the game is out — and, creatively speaking, is a bit of a dud — it stands as further evidence that religious literature is difficult to adapt, especially for the screen. Spend five minutes with a video-game console in hand, playing Dante’s Inferno as reinterpreted by its producer, Jonathan Knight, and you’ll want to stay away from Western Lit forever. And that’s a shame.

“The Inferno,” written 700 years ago by the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, is not a work of Scripture or church doctrine. While the Roman Catholic Church takes the stories of the Bible to be true (if not always literally), it takes no position on Dante’s poetic descent through nine circles of hell. But “The Inferno” — as well as its companion poems, “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso” — has in a sense become canonical.