‘Dante’s Inferno’ Religious Protesters Were Actors

If ANY company is the anti-christ, it's Walmart, come on.

During the coverage of last week’s E3, I remember seeing a group of protesters outside the event holding signs picketing the release of EA’s Dante’s Inferno. I though it a bit odd, and found their signs to be rather cleverly written (My high score is in heaven!), but didn’t think anything particularly of it because frankly, there are groups of Christians that love to frequently protest things.

A game that takes place entirely in hell would seem like something that potentially could upset a group of fringe conservatives, and no, I wouldn’t really expect them to do research to discover that the main character is actually killing demons in order to save his long lost love, rather than say, going on picnics with them.

But as it turns out, I was being a bit quick to judge, as the entire “protest” was actually a publicity stunt organized by EA, to promote the game, which in retrospect, is a pretty dumb idea as Catholic Video Gamer pointed out:

“Gamers of all varieties will buy this product if it’s, well, actually a good game. So instead of engaging in a shamelessly anti-Christian stunt to promote your poor excuse of a product, maybe you ought to work on making this game, you know, something better than a blatant God of War rip-off and make it, ya know, something worthwhile?”

Very true. Yes, EA should be concentrating on making Dante’s Inferno something other than a God of War clone (but I think it’s too late for that), but more importantly, by staging a stunt like this, they risk pissing off a very large section of the country who presumably buys their other non hell-related titles (myself included). They could have found themselves with an actual protest and/or boycott on their hands for a stunt that the world’s largest video game company should have probably realized wasn’t worth the few chuckles it got at E3.

Props to the local Christians for not being clueless enough to actually do this, but let’s try to carry over this “no protest” philosophy to those gay funerals as well now.

[via Gamepolitics]