Hades Interview

Supergiant Games’ roguelite action-RPG Hades left early access not so long ago to what looks to be pretty much universal acclaim. And according to this PC Gamer interview with Supergiant’s Greg Kasavin and Amir Rao, Hades’ early access journey is exactly the reason for its success.

Here’s an excerpt to get you started:

“Before we decided anything else, we decided that we wanted to make an Early Access game,” says Hades writer and designer Greg Kasavin. It was a surprising approach for indie studio Supergiant after Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre, none of which were developed in Early Access. But that wasn’t as surprising as Hades’ announcement back in 2018 as a roguelike—not what you’d expect from a studio best-known for its narratives and sumptuous art.

But the plan worked. Two years later and now fresh out of Early Access, Hades is fantastic, and one of the most talked-about games of the year.

“[Early Access] allowed us to get a small version of Hades out there relatively quickly, see how that goes and then build the rest of it in partnership with our community,” Kasavin says. “The roguelike dungeon crawler format is very well suited to that because it offers replayability while we’re building out more of the game over time.”

Supergiant was eager to build a game together with their fans, aware that a roguelike was a big departure from their earlier games. “If you’re a fan of our previous games, ‘early access roguelike dungeon-crawler’ is probably the last thing you want to hear, but I think as soon as they played it people saw this was still a game that had our values in it.”