This Halloween, EA likely made video game licensing history when they managed to attract four separate film studios to bid on the movie rights to a video game they hadn't even announced yet: Dante's Inferno. Today, Variety reports that the winner is Universal, and that they landed Dante's Inferno in a seven-figure deal.

But to GameCyte readers, there are two words in Variety's article that will likely prove far more important than "Universal" or "seven-figure deal." Those words are "Jonathan," and "Knight." EA's Jonathan Knight is the game's creator, will be collaborating with Universal on the movie, and thankfully for us,  included some very interesting facts about an unannounced franchise on his personal resume.

Jonathan Knight has quite the track record. He's directed voice acting sessions with Star Trek's Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner. He produced The Sims 2, and worked on a number of Sims expansion packs. He was creative director on The Simpsons Game.  But recently -- as reported by NeoGAF -- Jonathan Knight has been working on something else: "an original action/adventure franchise for PS3/XBox360 at the EA studio in Redwood Shores."

That's certainly exciting, but there's little to connect that game to the one that Universal recently acquired the rights to. Wouldn't you like to know a little more?

Executive Producer, Unannounced Franchise (PS3, X360, PC)

1      Creator and executive producer of an original action/adventure trilogy currently in production.
2      Building and managing a large internal team from ground up, with contractors and distributed development.
3      Simultaneously preparing the IP for a comic series, graphic novel, animated feature and feature film.
4      Planned worldwide announcement of the game in January 2009.

Voila.

The above is copied verbatim from Jonathan Knight's professional resume, which I found at his personal website several hours ago. The game in question is still not necessarily Dante's Inferno, but we have to admit there are some interesting connections, most notably that both name Knight as "creator" and both involve a feature film. But whatever Knight is working on, it will be huge. This is not just a potential franchise, this is a trilogy that will spawn books, comics and more than one film. This could be the next Mirror's Edge, the next Dead Space... and if this trilogy is indeed based on The Divine Comedy, I'll bet EA is hoping it will be the next God of War too.

If things go according to plan, we'll find out for sure in January 2009.

Though still quite far removed from proof that this unannounced franchise and Dante's Inferno are one and the same, there are a pair of recent events that help to corroborate the story. First, though Knight's LinkedIn page clearly showed that he was working on a "Unannounced NewIP Franchise" for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC as early as this morning (both Kotaku and Eurogamer picked up on this), plans for a PC version are now conspicuously absent.

Second, after we personally sent Knight a few questions asking about his resume, it -- and most of his other curriculum vitae -- disppeared from his personal website. We won't include the full document here, for fear of releasing Knight's email address and home telephone number, but you can see before and after pictures of Knight's website, as well as of the resume itself, right here.

Metadata in the resume indicates that all information is current as of August 26th, 2008.

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