Hollywood is rarely careful in its adaptation of books. For every movie like Fight Club - which, as its own author admitted, is better than his novel - we have to suffer through a dozen abortions like I, Robot, The Cat In The Hat or The Bonfire Of The Vanities.

Stephen King's horror tales fare particularly badly. The excellence of Kubrick's The Shining or Cronenberg's The Deadzone are dwarfed by a mountain of failures, with Children Of The Corn, Pet Sematary, Graveyard Shift and The Mangler forming the summit. In what can only be meant as a twisted form of revenge, King responded by writing a succession of books that were too awful to adapt.

This week sees the release of Dante's Inferno, Visceral's adaptation of a chunk of Alighieri's medieval poem, The Divine Comedy. In a stroke of sheer genius (or sacrilege, depending on your point of view), Dante's Inferno takes the poet's moralistic journey through the circles of Hell and turns it into a button-mashing brawler in the tradition of Devil May Cry or God Of War.

Videogames and 14th century epic poetry may sound like strange bedfellows, but Dante's cruelly imaginative depiction of the underworld, in which souls fight and suffer in sadistic torment, has been a source of artistic inspiration for centuries. As graphically, gleefully bloody as Visceral's game is, it's no more grotesque than the art of Gustave Doré, who illustrated a Victorian edition of the poem, or the twisted imagination of Dante himself. Anyone shocked by Visceral's treatment (and it's only a matter of time before the Daily Mail gets hold of it) should be directed to the Inferno's Eighth Circle, where the poet describes sinners being whipped, burned and heaped in excrement.

Some could argue that Dante's Inferno is a rather mindless adaptation that uses Alighieri's work as little more than a coat hook for a lot of simulated violence, but is this really such a bad thing? Hollywood has been missing the point of classic works of fiction for two generations.

The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's beautifully corrosive satire of 19th century high society, portrayed a generation of white, English upper-crust men as both morally bankrupt and malignantly narcissistic; in an era that hated women, homosexuals, foreigners and the lower classes with equal vehemence, who was there left to love but themselves?

Last year's screen adaptation of Dorian Gray flatly ignored all this, choosing instead to make a genteel Twilight-esque sub-horror flick about beautiful young men doing slightly naughty things.

With the right developer, Dorian Gray could make for an intriguing game. As a sandbox environment, what could be a more distinctive and evocative location than Victorian London, with its smog, gaslight and fourpenny knee tremblers?

Gray, meanwhile, would make the perfect anti-hero. A swaggering, posing dandy whose unquenchable thirst for hedonism would more than equal GTA IV's Niko Bellic. Like Bellic, Gray exists in an environment where sin goes apparently unpunished. The ravages of time, late nights, murder, laudanum and opium are passed instead onto the portrait hidden in his attic, while the anti-hero himself remains eternally young.

Dorian Gray: the game could be a thought-provoking, perhaps even disturbing exploration of the social mores and outright hypocrisy of Victorian London, a comparison of the grossly opulent lifestyles of the very rich, and the grinding poverty of the very poor.

Alternatively, the game could end up as another hyper-violent, joypad-battering beat-em-up with London accents and a lot of tall hats. Either fate would be infinitely better than Oliver Parker's tedious film.

The more literary titles on our collective bookshelves groan with brilliant ideas and ideal settings for videogames, and it appears that developers are finally beginning to take notice. Oddball Japanese designer Suda 51 (best known for Killer 7) is currently making Kurayami for PS3, a game based on Kafka's cold and creepy novel The Castle, while God Of War draws inspiration from epic Greek poems such as the Iliad.

Dante's Inferno may not take much more from Alighieri's work than its netherworld setting and diabolic monsters, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. At the very least, it could pique a young generation's interest in the poet's work, just as the 80s animation Ulysses 31 got me into Greek mythology as a youth. Videogame adaptations (or as I've heard some people describe it, the 'gamification') of books could become a way of bringing otherwise esoteric literature to a whole new audience.

Ryan writes his gaming column every week at Den Of Geek. Last week's is here.