It’s perhaps only in retrospect that we can see just how contemporary Devil May Cry was upon its release in 2001. The frantic, accelerated combat mechanics represented an industry pushing hardware to have games play as we’d so often wished they would. It was fast, brutal and responsive. It also introduced the series’ main protagonist, Dante, into the gaming public’s consciousness. This smart-assed, pizza-loving, sharp-dressing demon hunter went on to become the archetypical ‘cool’ video game hero. Fuelled by perceptions of the contemporary taken directly from the worlds of Anime and perceived notions of western ‘cool’: Dante was a product of his time and being contemporary was his nature. So, what happens when your contemporary character isn’t quite so cutting edge any longer? You reinvent him, of course.

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Fuck continuity. It serves, more often than not, only to incite fanboy rage and nit-picking. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of my favorite comic tales are Elseworlds or tales that take place in the future. They’re liberated from constrains that serve more to jerk off history than to give the world a richness. I’m feeling you, John Hodgman!

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