Video hits often look like big budget movies, requiring hundreds of developers, designers, and artists, as well as flashy 3D graphics and photo-realistic characters.
Not Supergiant Games’s ‘Hades’.
With a team of just 19, the San Francisco studio’s hand-drawn and self-published 2-D action game was one of the most acclaimed titles of 2020. Critics praised it for paying a modern tribute to Greek mythology – the main character is Zagreus, the son of Hades, who tries to escape from the Underworld – with razor-sharp play that rewards quick reflexes and quick thinking. The game achieved a positive rating of 98% among 110,000 players in the popular game store Steam, one of the highest ever on the 17-year-old platform.
The success was amid a pandemic that brought huge gains in video players and revenue, along with the devastation of remote work, which contributed to major delays and sloppy releases.
Super giant overcame the turmoil, closing its office near the civic center in the spring and completing ‘Hades’ remotely.
Amir Rao, Supergiant’s studio director, sees Hades as the highlight of the studio’s work to date, which includes three previous titles – Bastion, Pyre and Transistor – which have been well received, but not blockbusters. The games are all real-time – as opposed to turn-based – action games focusing on storylines and vivid fantasy worlds, and Hades is the most ambitious. It has spread more than 20,000 lines of dialogue among famous mythological figures such as Zeus and Achilles, along with more obscure characters such as Megaera and Hypnos, all of which help or hinder Zagreus and his pursuit.
Rao declined to disclose financial details, but said Hades had sold more than 1 million copies, making it the most successful game to date, which the independent company would fund for years to come.
Rao was born in San Jose and is studying English at Columbia University, with a view to eventually education. But after Rao took a class by Professor Bernie Yee, who combined humanities with computer science subjects to investigate video design, Rao found a new way.
He became Yee’s teaching assistant and later an intern at the video game behemoth Electronic Arts, headquartered in Redwood City. This led to a full-time job going to the University of Los Angeles’ studio.
Rao was a level designer for the Command and Conquer strategy series when he met his collaborators Greg Simon and Greg Kasavin, who joined Rao in 2009 to form Supergiant. The company’s first office was Rao’s father’s home in San Jose, and it was later relocated to San Francisco.
“It was a perfect opportunity to do something more personal and do it in a smaller group,” Rao said. “We can take greater creative risks than a smaller team.”
Supergiant’s first major jobs included Art Director Jen Zee, whose sensual images of Greek gods illuminated social media, and Audio Director Darren Korb, who created the soundtracks of the games and did much of the voice work, including that of Zagreus .
The first seven employees of Supergiant Games still work there 11 years later, a pride for the company.
“This is one of our biggest strengths because we have this history and this creative chemistry and we really work together,” Rao said. “We just get excited about each other’s work, because you know, we all do different things.”
Although the official release date was September 2020, Hades led a development led by players more than two years through early access, a practice where unfinished games are for sale. Developers are constantly releasing updates, known as patches, until a final product considered version 1.0 is delivered.
Early access can be a pitfall for developers who do not keep their promises, and some projects have been abandoned, but Supergiant has provided regular updates and seen the player base constantly grow, leading to more useful feedback on how to play the game improve.
The development of the game had another public aspect: it was videotaped by documentary producer Noclip, who followed the game from the initial announcement of 2018 through the challenges of constant updates and the sudden shift to remote work to the pandemic.
Danny O’Dwyer, founder of Noclip, said the success of Hades was unthinkable.
“It broke expectations for them and me,” O’Dwyer said, calling it “richer, deeper, longer,” but still maintaining the high quality of Supergiant’s previous games.
O’Dwyer acknowledges the studio’s ability for self-reflection and the productive way of resolving creative differences for its success.
“They are incredibly talented. They also carry a lot of humility. They are also self-critical in a healthy way; they are not contemptuous, ‘O’Dwyer said of Supergiant. “Like any good family or team, they are willing to argue with each other, enter into conversation with each other and still have water under the bridge.”
It’s telling that Rao has the title ‘studio director’, but that he rejects the CEO, a role that Supergiant does not have.
“It’s just a recognition of our common way of working that we all control something,” he said. ‘I make decisions with a group of people. … The thing I’m responsible for is how we work together, how we work together. ‘
Hades is a ‘roguelike’, a punishing video genre where players usually die over and over in dungeons filled with enemies and traps. Instead of saving progress and starting again at the same level where they failed, roguelikes force players to resume at the start of the game, eliminating much of their progress. The catch of the genre is that fights and locations are random, so each play is different.
The genre has attracted fans, but many opponents, comparing it to the head of the head repeatedly against a solid wall of trouble. But the player’s failures become an important storytelling tool in Hades, as each death for Zagreus – who is immortal and resurrects in his father Hades’ house – offers new dialogue options with different characters. By turning the usually disappointing on-screen game into a plot device, Hades helped draw in players who hated roguelike games of the past.
And even if the player manages to defeat the final boss, the story is structured in such a way that they are motivated to play another round to advance the plot.
Hades was also praised for his unconventional variety of characters: Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, is a black woman, while Hermes is an Asian man. This is in contrast to the ancient statues of Greek figures that had mostly uniform, roughly Caucasian features.
The reasoning, according to Rao, was that Greek gods were “worshiped in ancient Greece, not because they themselves were ethnically Greek”, which opened up different interpretations.
There is also the fact that Supergiant is largely made up of the children or grandchildren of immigrants, said Rao, whose family is from India, which informs his approach to design.
Stanley Pierre-Louis, CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, the major trading group of the video game industry, said the success of games like Hades shows that small, independent studios make compelling games and that players are looking for a variety of genres to play. play.
Global video game revenue is expected to rise to nearly $ 180 billion by 2020, according to research firm IDC, an annual increase of 20% as the pandemic keeps most people at home and longs for entertainment and online connections.
‘Games are fun, games are innovative and it connects people. The third point is really critical, “said Pierre-Louis.
For some, Hades has become a timely companion in the pandemic life: the player is essentially trying to escape from the home and find freedom, although Rao notes that there are moments of hope and lifestyle, despite the forbidden environment in the Underworld.
Rao said it is too early to say whether the studio will add content to Hades or what the next game will be. For now, the team rests. Rao plans to play games that other companies have released over the past year that he missed out on, in search of more inspiration.
Another question that many companies face is whether they should return to the office or make permanent distance work. Supergiant has not yet decided on a long-term policy, but he plans to keep his office in San Francisco for the time being – although it suffered a burglary during the summer protests that included the theft of instruments used to make game music. .
“We owe a lot to the Bay,” Rao said. “We really want to stay and want it to work, and we want it to last. Our response to when things are difficult is to pull together and try to work. This is just our way. ”
Roland Li is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email Address: [email protected] Twitter: @rolandlisf