At the risk of running off too far into a tangent, there was a time when I was all aboot video games, which was, unsurprisingly, when I was a kid in the 90's. I grew up with DOOM and its clones, but when Quake III came aroond and perfected video games as a concept to the point where it's pretty silly any other games were made after that, that's kinda all I played. The only thing that got me to put down q3 was DOOM3, which became my new years long obsession. But it was aroond that time that I lost interest in most new games coming out because, well, they sucked. There was apparently some sort of backlash against Doom 3, one which both made no sense to me and was completely alienating, and that seemed to be coming from a new audience that only wanted grey and brown realistic military shooters where you die in one hit and have to play on a controller which isn't physically possible for members of Homo sapien, which is the species I belong to. As a result, aside from one or two new games a year - 2006 had a CoC game and new Rampage, 2007 had Super Paper Mario, 2008 had Spore - I was officially sick of video games. It was after that point where the culture of video games became extremely toxic as well, which I'm definitely not going to get into here, and so going into the 2010's it had become very clear to me that video games were simply not meant for people like me anymore.
Because of all of that, as well as everyone's favorite symptom of depression, I no longer had any interest or even ability to play video games of any kind for more than an hour or so at a time, which has continued to this day. Occassionally, though, I did fire up one of the handful of things I still cared aboot, like Primal Rage, Mortal Kombat, smash pals, anything with Godzilla in it, weird indie games, and, of course, any of id's Wolf/Doom/Quake games. I had up until then just been playing them as they came out, but getting really into Doom 3 got me into the lore of id games and as a result I wanted to go back and revisit classic Doom with a fresh perspective and some pretty dark tinted nostalgia goggles. This started when I was in college, discovering the source port GZDoom and all of the insane improvements modders have been making in the ~15-20 years since the original game came out. Not only were the limits of the original game being stretched beyond all expectation, but the tools had also been heavily refined on that same timeline, meaning that not only could you essentially make anything you wanted in classic Doom, up to and including remaking q1 if you really wanted, but you ccould do it with extraordinary ease. And so, after a few years of getting back into classic Doom, I decided to start making my own stuff.And to me, it was obvious what needed to be done, DOOM is a game aboot going to hell and fighting demons. Obviously, obviously there needs to be a wad based on Dante's Inferno. The Doom 1 episodes were all 9 maps each, and there's 9 circles in hell, right? And honestly my first thought wasn't even to make it myself, I thought it already existed. I never played Master Levels for DOOM II when it was new, it wasn't deathmatch so it never entered the rotation at LAN parties. So when I heard of Dr. Sleep's Inferno series, and read a little aboot it, I thought that's what it was. But of course it's not, John's maps start seemingly at the vestibule, go up to Minos, and then jump all the way down to the 7th circle, as if Minos had judged you, but the readmes indicate Minos simply let the player pass, so there's no real explanation for why most of the circles are skipped. Additionally, the levels all look the same - they're all very pretty and cool in a way Doom levels typically weren't in the 90's - but by John's own admission the literary references were only to make people think he was smart. This baffled me, how the hell has no one actually made a damn Inferno episode based on Dante? I looked, and I saw a few attempts and false starts and things, but even then, no attempt had ever been made at actually creating maps for Doom that were actually based on hell as Dante described it. And that's... weird.
So I had my mission, if no one else had done it, then obviously it must be up to me. This is how I started mapping for classic Doom, before I even read the Comedy, and I started reading it specifically so that I could know what to make in my levels. I had always intended to do all three episodes, of course, which meant that after reading through two translations of Inferno, one of them good, I just picked up Purgatory and kept going. And then things got a lot more real, because Inferno really is quite good and definitely worth being remembered and read 700 years later... but Purgatory is the real reason you read Dante. For those who stopped at the first cantiche, or didn't even realize there was a sequel, they simply have no idea what Dante was actually capable of as a poet. Purgatory, more than anything else, made Dante more than just a manual for Doom levels to me, and made it something more important. I started wanting to make Doom out of Dante, because it seemed like the obvious thing to do, but now I want to translate Dante into Doom, because Purgatory needs to be seen.