Trivia / Hades

• Author's Saving Throw: The official patch notes highlight the changes that were implemented because of community feedback or popular request. For example, the button used to pet Cerberus was initially linked to the same button used to gift Nectar. Players didn't like such restrictions, prompting Supergiant to assign a different button to pet Cerberus as a part of the Blood Price update.
• Bonus Material: The physical edition for the console ports comes with an art booklet (Character Compendium) and a download code for Darren Korb's soundtrack (downloadable via MP3 or Lossless FLAC formats).
• Colbert Bump: Before this game, Zagreus was an extremely obscure Greek god, to the point where he was barely referenced at all in contemporary media. This game brought him to mainstream status by making him the main character.
• Descended Creator:
  • Greg Kasavin, the director and writer of the game, also voices Hypnos.
  • Darren Korb, the game's music composer, also voices both Zagreus and Skelly. In his case, he ended up becoming a Permanent Placeholder for both characters. He also provides the singing voice for Orpheus.
• Dueling Works: With West of Dead, another isometric, red-hued, Roguelike action game set in the afterlife, and released during the same year.
• Dummied Out:
  • The first game contains assets for Apollo as an Olympian God despite the character never seeing the final cut.
  • The game's scripts contain references to features that never made it to the final game, such as Hell Mode files starting with a small number of in-game currency or prophecies that would be completed by completing a run at high Heat or under a certain time.
• He Also Did: Darren Korb, who voices Zagreus, is also the award-winning composer of Supergiant Games' video games, including this one as well.
• Inspiration for the Work:
  • Darren Korb mentioned Radiohead (specifically the vocalist Thom Yorke and his falsetto) as an influence for the kind of vibe that would fit Orpheus' ethereal singing voice.
  • Joanne Tran, the environment artist of Supergiant Games, confirmed that the Map of the Underworld in Hades is inspired by the Abyss Map in Made in Abyss.
  • Greg Kasavin mentioned Red Dead Redemption as a major inspiration for the Playable Epilogue factor of this game. He played RDR before and saw that game as the best example that fully justifies why you can continue playing after the ending.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Zagreus is initially not very musically competent. Despite this, his voice actor is Darren Korb, who is the composer for the game's soundtrack and Orpheus' singing voice.
• Newbie Boom:
  • The game had a modest fanbase on par with Supergiant's other titles when it was in Early Access on PC, but its popularity exploded through the roof once Version 1.0 hit the Nintendo Switch.
  • Hades' critical and commercial success on both the PC and Switch caused this to be something of a Gateway Series to the Roguelike genre for many.
• Permanent Placeholder: As revealed in this interview, the dev team realized during the casting process that they liked Darren Korb's scratch tracks for Zagreus and Skelly more than the actual actors they auditioned for those roles. He ultimately got both parts.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to director Greg Kasavin, the game was originally going to be set in the Minotaur's labyrinth, with the Minotaur being at the center and the player having to hunt it down. However, the developers had a hard time coming up with a fitting story or protagonist for that concept. After Kasavin did some research and learned about Zagreus, a little-known Greek deity with very few surviving records about him, he realized that Zagreus' obscurity would be a good jumping-off point for a story, and the rest is history.
  • Later on, Co-founder Amir Rao revealed more details regarding the game's early development days and the aforementioned "Minotaur's labyrinth" concept; Hades was originally called Minos, the Player Character could've been Theseus, and the roguelike elements would've capitalized on the twisting labyrinth of Crete. Unfortunately, the team couldn't get a solid grip on who Theseus was as a hero, and he had the risk of being a generic protagonist. In the end, they rewrote Theseus into a showboating antagonist.
  • According to Art Director Jen Zee during a BAFTA Games Masterclass Interview, studying the Greeks and their love of artistic nudity early in development caused her to go through a phase where "literally 100% of the cast was going to be butt-naked."
  • From the September 2020 Reddit AMA, Supergiant mentioned that the Extreme Measures boss fights went through some changes from their initial concepts. For example, they originally started with the idea of fighting multiple Furies with their own health bars instead of the "support assist" version that they ended up with.
• Word of God: Zagreus' age is kept vague in the story, spawning some discussions and theories in the fandom. So when one fan asked in the 2020 Reddit AMA if Zagreus has a canon age, Greg replied "No; the gods are deathless and immortal. Time means little to them. No telling how old he is." Although in a follow-up sentence, Greg did mention that Zagreus "appears to be a young man in his early 20s" when compared to real-life human age, thus giving fans a rough idea on the "vague age" dilemma.
• Working Title: The game was originally given the title of Minos, as it was focused more on Theseus and the Minotaur during its early stages of development.