San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Small S. F. firm gives gamers ‘ rogue’ hit
Video game hits often resemble big budget movies, requiring the labor of hundreds of developers, designers and artists and flashy 3D graphics and photorealistic characters.
Not Supergiant Games’ “Hades.”
With a team of just 19, the San Francisco studio’s handdrawn and selfpublished 2D action game was one of the most acclaimed titles of 2020. Critics praised it for melding a modern homage to Greek mythology — the main character is Zagreus, the son of Hades, who is trying to escape the Underworld — with razorsharp game play that rewarded quick reflexes and quick thinking. The game achieved a 98% positive review score among 110,000 players on the popular game store Steam, among the highest ever on the 17yearold platform.
The success came amid a pandemic that saw both huge gains in video game players and revenue, along with the havoc of remote work, which contributed to major delays and messy releases.
Supergiant overcame that turbulence, closing its office near Civic Center in the spring and finishing “Hades” remotely.
Amir Rao, Supergiant’s studio director, sees Hades as the culmination of the studio’s work to date, which includes three previous titles — Bastion, Pyre and Transistor — that were wellreceived but not blockbusters. The games are all realtime — as opposed to turn-based — action games with a focus on story lines and vibrant fantasy worlds, and Hades is the most ambitious. It has over 20,000 lines of dialogue spread among wellknown mythological figures like Zeus and Achilles, along with more obscure characters like Megaera and Hypnos, all of whom help or hinder Zagreus and his quest.
Rao declined to disclose financial details but said Hades has sold over 1 million copies, making it the studio’s most successful game to date, which will fund the independent
“We just get excited by each other’s work because you know, we all do different things.”
Amir Rao, Supergiant’s studio director, on collaborating
company for years to come.
Rao was born in San Jose and studied English at Columbia University, with an eye on eventually teaching. But after taking a class taught by Professor Bernie Yee, who paired humanities majors with computer science majors to explore video game design, Rao found a new path.
He became Yee’s teaching assistant and later an intern at video game behemoth Electronic Arts, which is headquartered in Redwood City. That led to a fulltime job after college at the company’s Los Angeles studio.
Rao was a level designer for the Command and Conquer strategy game series when he met coworkers Greg Simon and Greg Kasavin, who joined Rao to form Supergiant in 2009. The company’s first office was the house of Rao’s father in San Jose, and it later moved to San Francisco.
“It was kind of a perfect opportunity to do something more personal and do it in a smaller group,” Rao said. “We could take bigger creative risks as a smaller team.”
Supergiant’s first key hires included Art Director Jen Zee, whose sensual depictions of Greek gods have lit up social media, and Audio Director Darren Korb, who creates the games’ soundtracks and does much of the voice acting, including that of Zagreus.
The first seven employees of Supergiant Games still work there 11 years later, a point of pride for the company.
“It is one of our biggest strengths because we have this history and this creative chemistry and we’re really collaborative,” Rao said. “We just get excited by each other’s work because you know, we all do different things.”
Though its official release date was in September 2020, Hades had a development guided by players over two years through early access, a practice where unfinished games are available for purchase. Developers continually release updates, known as patches, until a final product considered Version 1.0 is delivered.
Early Access can be a pitfall for developers who fail to meet their promises, and some projects have been abandoned, but Supergiant regularly delivered updates and saw the player base continually grow, which led to more useful feedback on how to improve the game.
The game’s development had another public aspect: It was videotaped by the documentary maker Noclip, which followed the game from its initial 2018 announcement through the challenges of constant updates and the abrupt shift to remote work after the pandemic.
Danny O’Dwyer, founder of Noclip, said the success of Hades was unimaginable.
“It broke expectations for them and me,” O’Dwyer said, calling it “richer, deeper, longer,” yet still maintaining the high quality of Supergiant’s previous games.
O’Dwyer credits the studio’s ability for selfreflection and its productive way of resolving creative differences for its success.
“They’re incredibly talented. They also carry a lot of humility. They’re also selfcritical in a healthy manner; they’re not self disparaging,” O’Dwyer said of Supergiant. “Like every good family or team, they’re willing to argue with each other, engage with each other and still have it be water under the bridge.”
It’s telling that while Rao has the title “studio director,” he rejects the label of CEO, a role that Supergiant doesn’t have.
“It’s just more of an acknowledgment of our collaborative way of working, that we’re all kind of in charge of something,” he said. “I make decisions with a group of people. ... The thing that I’m in charge of is how we work together, how we collaborate.”
Hades is a “roguelike,” a punishing video game genre where players typically die over and over in dungeons filled with enemies and traps. Instead of saving progress and restarting on the same level where they failed, roguelikes force players to resume at the very start of the game, eliminating much of their progress. The hook of the genre is that battles and locations are randomized, so each playthrough is different.
The genre has devoted fans but plenty of detractors, who liken it to bashing one’s head repeatedly against a solid wall of difficulty. But the player’s failures becomes a key story device in Hades, as each death for Zagreus — who is immortal and revives in his father Hades’ house — opens up new dialogue options with various characters. By turning the usually disappointing game over screen into a plot device, Hades helped draw in players who hated roguelike games of the past.
And even if the player succeeds in defeating the final boss, the story is structured so they are motivated to play another round to advance the plot.
Hades has also been praised for its unconventional diversity of characters: Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, is a Black woman, while Hermes is an Asian male. It’s a contrast to the ancient statues of Greek figures that tend to have monotone, roughly Caucasian facial features.
The reasoning, Rao said, was that Greek gods “were worshiped in ancient Greece, not because they themselves were ethnically Greek,” which opened up different interpretations.
There’s also the fact that Supergiant is largely composed of the children or grandchildren of immigrants, said Rao, whose family is from India, which informs its approach to design.
Stanley PierreLouis, CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, the video game industry’s main trade group, said the success of games like Hades show that small, independent studios make compelling games, and that gamers are looking for a variety of genres to play.
Global video game revenue is expected to soar to nearly $ 180 billion in 2020, a 20% annual increase, according to research firm IDC, as the pandemic kept most people home and craving entertainment and online connections.
“Games are fun, games are innovative, and they connect people. That third point is really critical,” PierreLouis said.
For some, Hades became a timely companion to pandemic life: The player is essentially trying to escape the house and find freedom, though Rao notes that there are moments of hope and levity, despite its forboding setting in the Underworld.
Rao said it’s too early to say if the studio will add content to Hades or what its next game will be. For now, the team is resting. Rao plans to play games that other companies released in the past year that he missed, in search of more inspiration.
Another question facing many companies is whether to return to the office or make remote work permanent. Supergiant hasn’t decided on a longterm policy, but it plans to keep its San Francisco office for now — though it endured a breakin during summer protests that included the theft of some instruments used to make game music.
“We owe a lot to the Bay Area,” Rao said. “We really want to stay and we want it to work, and we want it to last. Our response to when things are hard is to pull together and to try and make it work. That’s just our way.”