How Supergiant’s infernal Roguelike became a game of the year contender

By Chris sChilling

THE MAKING OF...

Format PC, Switch

Developer/publisher Supergiant Games

Origin US

Release 2020

Hell hath no fury like a protagonist scorned. So if there seems to be something personal in the way Theseus seeks to stop you progressing beyond Elysium, if you detect an undercurrent of bitterness in the way he talks, there’s a very good reason for that. The arena champion was set to be the star of Supergiant’s fourth game, you see, only to eventually be usurped by his more charismatic (and better-looking) counterpart. That resentment, then, is very real - and delightfully meta, too.

Yes, Hades began as a very different kind of Greek myth: based on the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, it was to be set in the Labyrinth on Crete. “The structure would have been about the telling and retelling of myths,” writer and designer Greg Kasavin tells us. “Each time it would be narrated differently, like a myth that’s told in different ways as it passes from generation to generation. That idea was exciting to us.” The story would take Theseus beyond the myth, he explains, and into the underworld, which would form the game’s final level. But while the concept was strong, the studio soon ran into “a few executional issues”. Then, as Kasavin was researching, he found a reference that took him by surprise. “Wait a minute, what? Hades had a son?” And if he wasn’t familiar with this tale, he reckoned most players wouldn’t know of Zagreus either. A decision was made. “Let’s forget this Theseus guy. Let’s make this a story about the son of the god of the dead.”

It was January 2018 when Supergiant made the switch, effectively the first thing after everyone returned to the office after Christmas. The game was already roughly three months into development: after shipping Pyre in July the previous year, discussions about another game took place the following month before work began in earnest around October. But having made such a dramatic change, the studio never looked back. Suddenly, it all began to come together. Art director Jen Zee’s very first design for Zagreus was “95 percent of the way there”. And the journey downward was flipped: now the player would start at the bottom of the underworld and work their way up. “The term I used was ‘a reverse Diablo’, where you’d fight your way to the surface,” Kasavin says.

Hades was taking shape quickly, which was good news given the very first decision Supergiant had made before anything else was determined: it wanted to make an early access game. The draws of that, Kasavin explains, were twofold; as a studio whose games are always a reaction of sorts to their predecessors, this was something it hadn’t tried before. “It was scary and exciting, and antithetical to how we’ve made games in the past - to have a game that is developed out in the open rather than in secrecy,” he says. It also meant that Supergiant could prove out an idea relatively quickly. Accustomed to taking three years to ship a game, it could take perhaps a year to launch it in early access and continue building from there, with the help of feedback from its playerbase. “They could help us from going off the rails in the middle of development,” Kasavin says. “They could help us pay closer attention to the biggest opportunities and the biggest weaknesses. Because when you’re in the middle of development, it can be easy to not see the forest for the trees, and lose sight of what you should really be focused on. So we felt early access would help us stay on the right track.”