Greg Kasavin (Hades) on Writing as a Form of Exorcism and the Role of Narrative in Games

Episode Description

Greg Kasavin is the creative director and writer at Supergiant games where he’s helped create critically acclaimed titles such as Bastion, Pyre, Transistor, and Hades.

Prior to working at SuperGiant Games, Greg worked as a games journalist for Gamespot where he rose the ranks from being an intern all the way to executive editor (editor in chief) of the publication. He’s also worked in various producer roles for games in the Command & Conquer franchise, and as a publishing producer on Spec Ops: The Line.

We talk with Greg about his relationship to the protagonist of Hades and what he thinks about the role of narrative in gaming.

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

Episode Notes

Learn more about Hades here.

Follow Greg on Twitter here.

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Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper

• Episode Transcript

  Phil 0:20
  What's up everybody? Welcome to origin story, the podcast where we interview creators about where they came from, to understand how they got right here. My name is Philip Russell and I'm with my co host.
  
  Ben 0:32
  It's me, Ben Thorpe.
  
  Phil 0:34
  What are we talking about today?
  
  Ben 0:35
  Okay, Phil. So today we talked to Greg cassava. And he's the creative director and writer on the game. And yeah, it was a pretty good conversation.
  
  Phil 0:44
  Yeah, it was really interesting to hear his perspective not only on Hades, but Greg also wrote, and I think creative directed all of the Supergiant Games that we know and love, like Bastion, transistor, and pyre. And to me, one of the most kind of mind boggling and really interesting insights that he gave was this idea of narrative just being another tool and the game makers toolkit to make the games that they do and that, I think, for somebody like me, who has always approached Supergiant Games, thinking that the story kind of is the most important aspect, and then everything else coalesces around it. It was it was really interesting to hear that, that that insight.
  
  Ben 1:31
  Yeah, I mean, I definitely I felt like I almost like, like, like, gasped in the interview, because I had this moment of like, what, what, especially because it's like, you know, I think about something like Bastion, which, you know, obviously was like the first, I think maybe one of the first like, really serious indie games that I was like, Oh, I love this very narrative driven, you know, has a narrator who is literally talking over some of the things that you do. And so thinking about, you know, someone like Greg being like, yeah, narrative isn't essential to games. I don't know, it was it was a surprising perspective, I think.
  
  Phil 2:09
  Yeah, and, but in the same token, the other interesting thing that we talked about was just how that perspective of, you know, narrative, not taking precedent over any other elements really speaks to supergiant as a studio and what they value and how they make the games that they do, which Greg, you know, talks a little bit about how, you know, the games are kind of made, and this almost collective way where, you know, if one person wants to go in a certain direction, and it's something that they're passionate about, and another person who wants to go in a direction that they're passionate about, it's kind of Greg's job as the creative director, to not only allow that creativity to happen, but to you know, try to try to build a narrative around those elements, so that they can make these, you know, really great games that they end up making.
  
  Ben 3:04
  Yeah, and I think he also kind of frames it in this way, where it's like, thinking about, you know, narrative, not superseding these other elements, whether it's like music, or like the actual game design. And I think you and I were kind of talking about this, before that interview about, like, thinking about how a lot of games now are beginning to maybe think about narrative in some ways that are similar to like, the ways that a movie thinks about it, and in some ways, just like mapping, kind of the narrative beats of a movie, onto a video game. And, and, and thinking about how something like hades in a lot of ways, bakes its narrative into the actual structure of the kind of the gameplay, that you're that you already have that, like, it's not going out of its way to it's like, it's still a dungeon crawler, it's not giving you kind of cutscenes that feel like they belong in a in a movie interspersed within gameplay. You know, it's very much a part of the gameplay.
  
  Phil 4:06
  Yeah. And, and that bled into this whole conversation that for people that are, you know, in the kind of gaming sphere, difficulty, and, you know, I think, I think games like Dark Souls and whatnot have have spawned this whole discussion around, how difficult should games be? Should there be an easy mode? Should there, you know, be you know, Does, does adding an easy mode compromise the experience, and Ben, you know, brought that up, and we got some interesting perspectives on what Greg thinks about difficulty.
  
  Ben 4:43
  Yeah, and also, I think, you know, for the for the listener, maybe listen to how soon I brought up that I have not been able to beat this game. And think about you as a smart person. When would you have brought that up and what did I have been maybe quite So soon in the in the interview process, because I swear listening back to this interview, you can hear every successive question I think I asked for that you can kind of hear him being like, this guy who can't even beat my game is trying to ask me a question. I hate to see it.
  
  Phil 5:18
  Yeah, I was sitting there like the Greek chorus is not in along like Yeah, I agree. I agree, Greg. I love Dark Souls, Seco. Love it. But the secret is, I still haven't been in
  
  Ben 5:31
  it either. And you just let me just let me die out there in the hot sun of Greg's rage.
  
  Phil 5:37
  Hey, man, it's Doggy Dog world out here. So yeah, this this conversation was really great. Hades was such a big an explosive game last year that it was really interesting to hear Greg's perspective and I'm not gonna tell you what it is. But I'll just say Greg had a very interesting story about how he's viewing Hades now in relation to himself. So without further ado, how about we hop right in? Roll the clip?
  
  Greg cassava is the creative director and writer at Supergiant Games, where he's helped create critically acclaimed titles such as Bastion, pyre transistor, and most recently, Hades. Prior to working at supergiant Greg worked as a games journalist for Gamespot, where he rose the ranks from being an intern all the way to Editor in Chief. He's also worked in various producer roles for games such as Command and Conquer. And as a Publishing Producer for SpecOps the line. Greg, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Congratulations. On the recent game of the year word from dice. That seems like an incredible
  
  Greg Kasavin 7:23
  a word. Yeah. Yes, we are blown away. It's one of those things where it isn't too often when games from smaller teams can can be in that running. Although last year, the year before us, I believe it was untitled goose game that took the top honors. So Oh, really? Yeah. So it's, it's pretty. It's pretty fun that we get to follow, follow their lead. Yeah, we, you know, we've, we've been so just so humbled by all the all the support that the game has received, over over the months since since our launch, it was something that we certainly couldn't have expected.
  
  Phil 8:07
  Yeah, and it seems kind of like with Hades, since that was an early access game, that it's kind of had a long a long tail to it, in terms of getting through development. And then were you all kind of expecting such a, you know, I'd say explosive response when it when it released finally,
  
  Greg Kasavin 8:27
  it I mean, no, in part because of the, you know, early access period, it felt like, you know, due to early access, that the game was maybe more of a known quantity than some of our past titles were, you know, we work on for transistor empire, we work on them for three years, you know, we announced them at some point along the way and have them playable at maybe a show like Pax. But for the most part, we're working in relative secret secrecy, and only kind of find out how we did once the whole thing is done. But with Hades, we launched it in early access after a little over a year and development. So spent, you know, close to two years, kind of being made out in the open and we got really great feedback and, you know, really enthusiastic player base during early access in the game did quite well, in early access relative to to our other titles. So we knew that there was going to be some number of people out there who are like, you know, I'm gonna wait until this game is done to check it out. But we had no way of knowing just how many people that would that would end up being. So yeah, I think the fact that it had been out there, you know, had been pretty well kind of reported on by the press and stuff like that. We thought that that would sort of potentially limit how big of a deal or 1.0 launch could be, of course, you cross your fingers going into any of that stuff. You fantasize that maybe you know everybody We'll love this thing that you've been working on, but you don't really tell yourself that that's, you know, has any real chance of happening. And so we, yeah, it's, it's gone. It's certainly beyond anything we could have anticipated,
  
  Ben 10:16
  do you think that'll that'll change your relationship to development on future games that, you know, letting people in and having that early access allows for, to some extent, I guess, a longer period for people to get interested and invested in a game?
  
  Greg Kasavin 10:30
  You know, that's just one of the that's one of the benefits, but it's like, the other benefits that I think we're more drawn to are the part where we just were able to make a bigger and better game by, by working on it with, with community feedback, as part of it. It was, you know, our team grew from about 12 people to closer to 20, which is a pretty big percentage increase, I guess, over the course of Hades is development. And and the the new voices who joined us the our new members of our team had had a huge, it's impossible to think how we could have ever done it without them. But the other key point that changed for us is the Early Access development process. And that that was really, I think that just helped us do things better stay more focused, than we've been able to kind of over the same time period in previous years. So that alone, I don't know that, like the exact configuration of early access that we use for Hades is like what we would ever do, you know, from here on out, but like we would have to give it some serious thought on anything we did in the future, because it just ended up working out so well for this game. It just led to a better result. Yeah.
  
  Phil 11:51
  Yeah, I think, you know, one thing that anybody who's familiar with Supergiant Games can expect is that, you know, it's going to have amazing are, it's going to have great music, it's going to have some kind of strong narrative element. But I think the one thing that people can't anticipate is what actually is the direction of the game going to be so like, I don't think anybody could have imagined that after pyre, you guys would make a game like Hades, which is about, you know, Greek myth, and as a roguelike. So I'm curious what, you know, what inspired that project kind of coming off a pirate and whatnot.
  
  Greg Kasavin 12:28
  Yeah, we, you know, we've said each of our games is always a reaction to the game we made before. So it's, I appreciate you bringing up pirate because pyre has everything to do with what Hades is. And despite how different Hades is from pyre, it's this very kind of action forward and game. And as you note, it's a, it's a roguelike game, which is a just couldn't be a more different genre than the style of game that Hades, that pyre is rather. But many of the thematic elements are very similar. They're both games about escaping purgatory, for example. And they both have these kind of big ensemble casts of, of characters, a lot of the narrative techniques that we were exploring and pyre were like, so compelling to us, for that entire project that we just decided to keep, you know, for me, personally, I was just still very interested in all those ideas to, you know, spend another three years kind of tinkering away at them on Hades. But we really wanted, you know, we were now like, 10 years old, as a studio, the all seven of us from the Bastion days, we're all still together, we've been working together for a long time, then. And, and we're asking ourselves, why, you know, each time we set out to make a game, we kind of start all over, we throw everything off the table, come up with some completely new idea and, and actually kind of try to avoid any of the ideas that we've used in the past. Because we're trying to make, you know, a whole a whole new world a whole new experience. So it has to kind of be built on its own ideas. But that just gets harder and harder over time. If you can't, like use your own good ideas, if you can't, if you can't do things that you did well, and even enjoyed doing, like if that's all off the table, and you just have to find new stuff. It just, we were starting to worry. I was starting to worry. And and so we asked ourselves like what, why can't we just take all the stuff that we've done well and enjoy doing in the past and mash it all up? And just just kind of try to go from there. And we we one of the other things that we were very drawn to is with Bastion, a really big priority for us was the kind of pickup and play aspect of that game. Like anybody could just grab it, start running around breaking stuff, whatever it didn't. You didn't don't necessarily feel like you're a go into this, going into this, you know, big deep experience. But hopefully that big deep experience was actually there for you to be discovered, you know, through the narrative and everything. So going back to this mindset of making our games like really, really easy to dive into immediately, and then what's interesting about them, kind of grows on on you. Over time, that was something that I felt strongly about that, that our games should have like a really low barrier to entry. So those, those ideas, the idea of making an early access game, just changing up our development process, so we can have our game be kind of playable and stable, all through development, get community feedback, and stuff like that, to keep us to keep our eyes on the prize as it were not not get to sort of off course, in the middle of development, those were some of the ideas, and then the Greek myth part. That happened to feel like a really strong theme for like a roguelike. Game. And we're, you know, we're kind of wondering, yeah, okay, Greek myth. It's heavily used, right. It's heavily used in in movies, and books and games and stuff like that, but it hasn't been used in a roguelike. And we have we ourselves as a team have never made an adaptation of something. And that was interesting and scary to us. Like we were more ironically, I think, kind of more comfortable creating our own stuff from scratch, having done that several times in a row, then then adapting an existing mythology. And we felt we had a point of view on Greek myth that, you know, we hadn't seen done too much before. So well, let's give it a shot. That's kind of those were a lot of our thoughts at the beginning,
  
  Ben 16:48
  Greg, you're kind of already touching on it. But we had this question about, you know, I think with a lot of triple A games, there's an effort to kind of mimic the narrative beats that you might feel in like a movie or in a novel in some ways, Hades is working to kind of bake in its narrative beats to dialogue and conversations that feel like they still stay within kind of what Hadees is, which, you know, is like a roguelike dungeon crawler, was there a conscious effort to try to get this story of escape to map with the kind of game that Hades is?
  
  Greg Kasavin 17:22
  Oh, yeah, absolutely. The you know, we we get asked sometimes, like kind of the the chicken and egg question of what comes first at supergiant you know, is that the story is that the design and the gameplay? And, and for us, it actually has a pretty simple answer, which is the design. However, we do think of the design and the narrative very closely together, we're thinking about the kind of thematic substance and the, you know, what might be the sum total experience of our game before any of it exists. But we will never just, you know, start with a story and then back solve the gameplay onto it, the design ends up being a really useful constraint for what the story is and can be. And we're very interested in telling stories that are uniquely suited to the format. Because, you know, if you just want to tell a story, for its own sake, I've said before, it's like, they're really much more efficient ways of doing that than making a video game. Like you could, you could write a novel, that's like pure story. There's no, you know, engine, or whatever, there's no like having to do all the pesky gameplay, or which, which makes like storytelling in games, there are a lot of obstacles, to get over to be able to deliver a story in the format of a game. So if you're going to do it anyway, you might as well take advantage of what makes games unique, which is their interactivity, and their structure. So for us, the idea of a roguelike game was was, was the was the first decision and and kind of like the constraint on the story, we were excited by the idea of a roguelike game with narrative continuity, where each time you die and start over, you, as a player already carry forward your knowledge of everything that happened. Even if you lose all your power ups and whatever, lose all your progress. You still remember what happened, you're going to remember, you know, getting to that boss, and you know, the bosses patterns and stuff. So we liked the idea of having a narrative that was aligned with the player experience where you're, you know, the protagonist character also remembers these things and the bosses you face also remember these things like, the first time you encounter a boss in a roguelike game, oh my god, what is this thing? What can it do? And so on the 20th time you encounter that boss, you know what you're in for? So having, having the narrative again, play into that where the 20th time you encounter these bosses, it's like, Alright, let's do it again. You know, it just it felt fun. And, and so that's the idea that we wanted to pursue and back to pyre our previous game. One of our big things in pyre was the idea of like, no game, overstate the the story moves forward, no matter what happens no matter what you do. So it was kind of approaching a roguelike game with the same mindset of, there's no game overstate in Hades, it just keeps, you know, the story advances no matter what. And in fact, you know, dying in this game is just part of, it's just part of what the roguelike experience is. So trying to use the narrative to address a key issue that some players can have with roguelikes, which is that it can be really frustrating to die and lose everything. And yet, what's so special about roguelikes is that they're different every time you play. So wanting to use the narrative to help players, you know, want to want to keep going. It's kind of like, I don't want to be too clinical kind of about my own work in that way. But really narrative for us is is just another is just one of a number of tools we can use to keep players feeling invested and interested. And we don't know what, what a player's motivations are right? Like, do you want to be the best player in the world? Do you want to like do the fastest speed run? Or are you like, super invested in the characters and story or maybe all those things or something like that. So as many ways as we can introduce, to keep you feeling excited to go forward where we're interested in exploring that in our games.
  
  Phil 21:24
  Yeah, that's, I love all that. Because I think when I first played Hades last year, you know, I like roguelike games I like, you know, like, quote, unquote, hard games like, like the the Soul series and things like that. And I can find enjoyment in terms of like, dying and trying again. But something that was so unique about Hades, I think, especially being a writer myself is just, yeah, that like you said, that dying loop of coming back. And then, you know, if you've, if you haven't played Hades, it's like, you die. And you come back. And everybody like, has something to say about how you died. They like mentioned the type of enemy that killed you. And then you get to meet all your friends and enemies again, and they have and they have new dialogue. And it's such a delightful loop like, and in some ways, it's like I looked forward to dying again, because it allowed me to progress the story. And that was like a really, really unique experience. And I think, you know, there's already dams that are now starting to do more of that.
  
  Unknown Speaker 22:27
  Welcome to the house of Hades where I know you guess that means you to hide out there, huh? Oh, don't be sad, though. Pretty much everybody dies sometime.
  
  Unknown Speaker 22:38
  Some of us more than others.
  
  Phil 22:40
  I'm curious. We've been talking to a lot of developers about interactive fiction and kind of your point of, you know, there's much easier ways to tell stories than rested making a game. One thing I'm fascinated about with roguelikes is this idea of looping or repetition and how that can can heighten the story. So I'm curious for you as a writer, just what draws you to make this interactive medium to tell the stories that are kind of happening.
  
  Greg Kasavin 23:13
  Yeah, I mean, the the simple answer is I've always I've loved games since my earliest memories. I I think I just kind of personally experienced the power of the video game as it were. When I was a little kid, I hark back to when I was eight years old, playing a game called Ultima four, I played many. So even before I was I was playing games for probably since, again, my earliest memories, I don't know, my memory starts at like five or six or something. So I was always playing games even before this. But ultimate four is like, it's kind of like the it's the ancestor of every, you know, open world Western RPG you've ever played stuff like Witcher three, or Skyrim, or whatever. I think all those games owe a lot to the Ultima series, where you could go anywhere, attempt to do anything and basically experience the consequences of your actions, you know, go into a village want to kill the shopkeeper go ahead and try and like Rob their store or something like that. And then, and then, you know, as a kid be like, Oh, my God, what did I just do? I can't believe this game. Actually, let me do that. And what is the strange feeling I'm having is this, you know, feeling bad, like, and it didn't tell you you should feel bad, you just like got to experience the outcome. So it was it was just an incredibly fascinating game for me, and I still remember it fondly, as you can tell. So I think that the games you know, the interactivity, the ability to sort of like create empathy by by making you embody someone who is not you in in a different situation and let you sort of like a experiment, I guess by being in a totally different situation than then you yourself would be in. And as part of your daily life, I think I think that, to me has always been extraordinarily powerful. And I've always loved both these kind of like, a highly choice driven games, but also, you know, highly crafted, narrative driven games like I loved, you know, Japanese RPG is as much as I loved Western RPG is the stuff like early Final Fantasy games that were really pioneering. And they're sort of like kind of more linear storytelling, that I identified these advantages that they had of like, stronger characters, these these bigger kind of set piece moments involving, you know, music and dramatic character moments and this sort of stuff. It's like, well, if I was just controlling every moment of these characters lives, I wouldn't have done it this cool as they came up with. So I think in my own, you know, I have just drawn a lot of influence from, from all those aspects. And I just, I just kind of gravitated toward all kinds of different games. Yeah, I think, hopefully, that begins to answer your question. But you know, I studied like, myself and my colleague, Amir, who's one of the cofounders of supergiant, we're both like English majors or whatever we like, you know, we can have our background, you know, we've done plenty of reading and stuff like that as well. So just trying to draw some of the just find more of the power of of story as it were, within seeing what games can do there. There's a lot of constraints, they can't do a storyteller storytelling, as well as certain other media in certain regards. But then the interactivity, you know, can, can compensate for it and create these really unique experiences in its own right.
  
  Ben 27:01
  So I am about to confess to you something dark, which is that I have not been able to beat Hades. And I am wondering, you know, I think there's a conversation here about difficulty in games. And Phil was kind of talking about it before, which is like, this is a game that feels like it's it's accepting of my failures, that it's like, kind to me, despite my fit, you know, failures. And so it's like, it may be unforgiving in its gameplay. But you know, ultimately, the game itself feels like it's not punishing me or looking down on me for these failures. And I'm wondering if you can talk about maybe your perspective on difficulty in games, and, you know, accessibility of difficult games.
  
  Greg Kasavin 27:46
  Yeah, it's, uh, you know, it's a really broad question. I would recommend if you're still interested in pressing on, we have a feature in Hades called God Mode,
  
  Ben 27:55
  and I haven't had I haven't been able to bring myself to do it yet. Yeah,
  
  Greg Kasavin 27:59
  you in my opinion, you shouldn't hesitate as with it, to your point, like there is no, I mean, we took care to contextualize godmode in such a way that it is not, it's not an easy mode, it's about it's, it's a it's a mod that lets you learn more, each time you play is how I would put it because it makes the game a little bit more tolerant of individual mistakes, it doesn't, it doesn't make it so that you don't have to do the work as it were to get through, you'll just be a little bit tougher, survive a few more hits and sort of be able to loop. Because Because in roguelike games that can be, you know, you get to a boss, they kill you instantly, it's like you didn't even learn anything, you have to get all the way back there, you know, to begin sort of scouting out what they could do. So that was our thinking and God Mode, it's like, if we could just make it a little bit more resilient to damage, you'll have more time to, to just sort of process what's going on. And, and, and you get tougher each time you die. So that was our way of, of making sure that you know players who you know, are not as as proficient as, as some players are, can still get through if they start to feel invested in the story and just want to see how it ends. I mean, my my feeling on I personally as someone who's Yeah, I've been playing games since I was a little kid. I appreciate very challenging games. I don't personally have any sort of belief of like one size fits all type design solutions. I know there's like a lot of discussion of you know, all games should have easy modes and stuff like that. I personally don't ascribe to those kinds of beliefs. Like like Philip, I am a fan of Souls games and stuff like that. I know that if those games offered me an easy mode, I would I would have sort of cried to uncle and use those use those modes and then had a really different experience than the ones I had, which were incredibly rewarding. Like a second row, I somehow got through that game as my favorite game that I played in years. I, I have no idea I have no idea how I did I thought I was like, well past the point in my life when I could, I could pull that off. It was it was absolutely painstaking. But it was incredibly rewarding. But yeah, so game developers should basically do whatever they want, and, you know, face the consequences of their actions, just like the rest of us. But to the extent that developers can account for a broader player base, you know, without compromising on their vision, of course, they should do that. It's hard. Every, like, accessibility features are not easy to add nothing in game development is easy to add, everything has to be tested, everything has to be tested in combination with everything else. So game players, I know, it can be really frustrating to wonder why, you know, Dark Souls doesn't have like an easy mode, or whatever. But it's like, when the whole game has been meticulously tuned around a particular experience. And it's this massive game, it's really easier said than done for them to just go and add an easy mode or something like that, at least that's my perspective on it. But I don't know, what are all the reasons they have or haven't, you know, haven't done something like that? I think I think they they have a particular way. You know, if the if from a brief from software diatribe, or, you know, they, they have never done things conventionally I love from software, you know, from back in the day when they were making these very strange games that did not follow conventional wisdom. If from software followed conventional wisdom, Dark Souls or any of those games, none of them would exist. So they should keep doing what they're what they're doing as far as I'm concerned. But But yeah, game difficulty is a is a tricky subject, because games ideally, you know, should be for everyone. But sometimes they're not. But you know what? No media is for everyone. And, and I think that that's okay, because if media has to be for everyone, it starts to get really watered down. And I personally would not like that I'd rather have things you know, fit certain players like, like, oh my god, this is the perfect game for me. It may not be the perfect game for you, but it's a perfect game for me. Whereas games that try to please everybody, maybe they maybe they don't succeed in pleasing anybody. That's that's always the risk.
  
  Phil 32:40
  Yeah, I think to kind of pivot a bit about supergiant as a as a whole. You know, I'm going to ask the stupid question here of like, you know, what does a creative director do at a at a studio? Like supergiant? I realize it's probably different, depending where you work, but like, yeah, what's your what's your like day to day? Like in terms of creative direction and things like that?
  
  Greg Kasavin 33:03
  Yeah, it's a good, it's a good question. I think I think my, I think my job probably does not fit the, I think someone else's. A Creative Director at a bigger studio probably has a really different job than mine. Functionally, what I do is I, I have a big focus on on the narrative design of our games, I'm there like, you know, I help formulate the, the concept of the game, then contribute to the design all along the way, and then ultimately, help market and launch the game and stuff like that. So my role, though, is, I see it as kind of providing context for my colleagues to do their best work. It's basically like letting them do what their find a finding should be able to explain this better. I want to find the intersection between what makes all of my colleagues the most excited, because that's our game. It's not about telling any of my colleagues like, oh, no, that you know, this is, this is what the game is do this. It's about saying, what do you really want to do? Like what makes you the most excited? What do you want to explore as a creator? And when we can sort of pull everybody individually? Find out all their individual answers. You can think about a Venn diagram, it's like, take Darren, Darren Korb, our GDS, audio director and composer, what's all the stuff that Darren is excited about? And then take Gen Z are our genius art director, what's all the stuff that Gen Z excited about? What's the overlap between Gen and Darren, and basically keep doing that across the board until the sort of intersection might be very small, but it's there, and that's what we should make. And basically just trying to keep us there and and, you know, in my role less, as a writer, what the writing can do is create the connection between otherwise totally unrelated elements. So that's like practically what I'm often doing is using the words and the writing to sort of respond to the design decisions, respond to the art decisions, etc, until it gives the impression that it's all this cohesive thing that we planned meticulously, when in reality, a lot of it is much more kind of improvisational, during the course of development, we just try stuff all the time, we're responding to one another's work, we don't know if anything is going to stick until you know, one day, we just don't change it, stuff like that, and then it just sort of starts to come together. So yeah, it's a lot of like, that's the more abstract answer, but day to day, you know, with with Hades as a as an example, I was doing the writing and integrating all of the, all of the voiceover, and like, basically setting up all the different story events. And then I also, you know, built some of the chambers design some of the enemies and like, kind of contributed to other some of the boons, etc. And like, our design team is contributing to all aspects of the design, varying, varying degrees,
  
  Ben 36:28
  it almost sounds like you're kind of negotiating between some of your different co workers like passions and trying to make sure that everybody is doing something that they really care about
  
  Greg Kasavin 36:37
  negotiation is a really good, yeah, negotiating is a very good verb for it. It's very often a negotiation for sure. It's like, one of the things i i discovered over the years is like, my own personal excitement, is is just like, kind of, I have to often set that aside. Because I am not making this stuff on my own. If I if I had the superpower of like, Lucas Pope, the creator of papers, please and Oprah den, and I could just make a whole game all by myself, by golly, I would probably be doing that, but I can't. I lack many, many kinds of proficiencies. And I've done my best work as part of a team not as an individual. So I so basically, knowing that it's like, it's so important that, that everyone be as fired up as possible. Because game development often is a slog, it's like often not that pleasant. There's just a lot of like, a lot of stuff you wish would be easy is, is more painstaking than it should be. So like your excitement is just going to be what carries you through the sort of the valleys and the troughs. So we just really, for me, it's just so important that everyone feel as as kind of engaged with it as possible. Because yeah, it's not always going to be in like the honeymoon, you know, blue sky phase, when we're all excited about the cool new game we're going to make, like, once you start making it, it's not, it's not always as, as joyful as that. So yeah, kind of believing in it, feeling like you could do your own best to work within that sort of sandbox and having the latitude to, to express yourself personally and creatively. Rather than having someone tell you what to do, or whatever, like that, that's all very important to us. And as a small team, we can afford to do it that way. Because, you know, again, back to the part where someone in my position probably as a really different role at a big studio. You can't if you work with 1000 people, they can't all just be doing whatever they want, you know, and for you to hope to have some cohesive thing at the end, you probably need more in the way of marching orders in that type of structure. That's not to say we don't have any structure like that either. But yeah, we we do try not to constrain people's kind of individual, individual creativity. When working on AR games.
  
  Ben 39:13
  I feel like that kind of opens the door to this conversation about workplace culture. And I was reading through you there was an interview with Kotaku that you did that kind of talked about the importance of sustainability at supergiant and kind of one of the unique ways that supergiant has approached workplace culture is is not only kind of giving people days off, but trying to incentivize people to take those days off. I think there's a requirement that you take 20 a year. Can we talk about like what what that's led to or, you know, what are the what are some of the ways that you have worked to create a good kind of culture? Where Yeah, like you're talking about, there is some some passion around the work that you do. But also you know, there's there's not the push to maybe overextend your itself or to kind of always be kind of sledging around along.
  
  Greg Kasavin 40:05
  Yeah, I mean, I think the starting point for us is that we, we want to be in it for the long haul, we want to stick together as a team and keep making stuff together for as long as we can and as long as we want to. And that means not grinding ourselves into the ground and burning out. It's really as simple as that. The thing about so game development can be intense, there are very high standards of quality out there, there are a lot of extremely talented hard work hard working teams releasing amazing games all the time. And it's very, very difficult to make a game that anybody notices or cares about. So by default, I think there's kind of no shortcut to hard work in order to make something worthwhile, that, you know, players are interested in. Worthwhile is a is a bad term for it. It's the, if you're making games commercially, which we are I, you know, I have to acknowledge that we're like a group of people, we have to, you know, we pay our team, right, like, so we, we have to our games have to make money so that we can make more games as part of our goal of staying together. So and then in order for that to be possible, we have to make a game that people are willing to pay for. And the standard is standard for that as high. As there's an unlimited amount of work possible. When you're making a video game, I think of any size or shape. You could spend a near infinite amount of time, you know, rewriting a paragraph redoing an individual piece of art iterating on a piece of music. So when do you stop? When do you move on? That's like a constant question. You have to ask yourself as a developer, as a developer, and it's not easy always to know the answer. So knowing you could spend unlimited time on anything, and there's a mountain of work to be done. It's like how do you how do you structure it and keep yourself from? How do you ever finish anything? How do you keep yourself from, from kind of going mad trying to, you know, get it all done. And then on top of that, it is an industry where you have people like me who like happened to happen to love games as well as work on them, right? So it's like you do, there is a lot of joy in the work, there is a lot of excitement. And when you're like really invested in the work that can lead you to pushing yourself and you know, work and working long hours, not because anyone's telling you to, but because you you're fired up about it. So for all these different reasons, yeah, we have to like put some put some like, I'm hesitating to say limits. Because again, it's like, it's we want to make sure that everyone who works with us can find can work in the way that is best suited to them personally. But part of that there are these things like you must take time off. It's not it's not a it's not a request, it's a requirement.
  
  That was one of the simple things that we did, because yeah, we started in the article you alluded to, we talked about how we had an open vacation policy, you know, take as much as you want. And then what we discovered was people like me, and it wasn't just me, would would use that policy to take, you know, basically no vacation. It's like, oh, I you know, I couldn't take some but I, you know, I just didn't get around to it. So we had to invert that and say, no, no, you must take a certain amount of time each year. And that worked better. It required people to think about it and sort of changed their scenery, which is really important to keep doing worthwhile creative work. And then yeah, there are things like, you know, we would be emailing each other on weekends and stuff like that, and like some people would work on weekends, other people would not be but then like having having a bunch of emails bouncing around over weekends would like create a lot of pressure and anxiety for those, you know, both who were working and and who weren't. And it's like, Well, should we just ban working on weekends altogether? Well, like for some people, that doesn't seem right because some people you know, what, what if you want to what if you're like working on something you're excited about. So the compromise in that case was like the kind of no email on weekends type of policy, which for me personally was great. Because I am the sort who I very frequently work on weekends but not having to worry about emails as part of that is wonderful. And it does let us check out you know, come Friday at 5pm or whatever I personally experienced like a mental shift of like, okay, things are winding down for them. again right now and I'm in a different mode for the next couple of days and don't really, if there's if something big comes up, someone's going to call me. It's not going to be just some email where I have to keep checking that that feels good. Yeah. So I mean, things like that we've learned about it. Those are all discoveries over the many years, we've worked together, they're small things individually, but I think I think having like a positive and healthy culture as a game development studio is that's like a that's a journey, not a destination, right? You don't just like say, we've instituted these policies we're done. You're just kind of always looking for more things of that nature. Because the world and the industry continue to evolve. So we have to keep looking out for what helps make the whole endeavor asst sustained, sustainable for all of us.
  
  Phil 45:51
  Yeah, the, I'm curious to talk about circling back to this idea of you know, when supergiant makes games, it's kind of like, you try to negotiate the various interests and then combine it into this, this super force of a game, which I'd kind of I almost call that Hades to me, when you say like, oh, the narrative wasn't necessarily the, the design came first. It's like, so baffling to me, because it feels the game feels like, like a perfect combination from a narrative perspective and relate to the gameplay, but I'm curious, you know, supergiants, a fairly small studio. And it sounds like most people have been there for a very long time, if not, from the very beginning. That and that seems kind of rare to me, like I write. I do like games criticism for fun, essentially, on the side for various websites. And I've been seeing so much talk lately about the industry and, you know, lack of job opportunities that like entry level or, or mid level. I don't even know where my question exactly is going. But I'm I guess I'm really curious about, like, Hades, for instance, has a very diverse cast of characters, everything from identity to race, and the story itself, sexuality. I'm curious, like, what your perspective is on the industry becoming, like a more diverse place that can allow, like, more, you know, types of people to join in? Especially who are just starting out? Like, how, what do you think the map is like for that?
  
  Greg Kasavin 47:38
  Yeah, I mean, it's so it's the, it's so important. It's, it's one of the best things that the industry has, has going for it, the I attribute it partly to the fact that the barrier to entry to creating games is lower than ever before. It used to be not 10 years ago, or something like that, like the Unreal Engine license is like a million dollars or something like that, right? Like it was just you could not use the Unreal Engine unless you unless you worked as part of, you know, a small handful of big companies. But now you have this stuff, like Unity and Unreal, is just download it. Like, the only thing standing between you and making a video game is it's still so you need your internet connection, you need a decent PC, you need a ton of time. And those are not free resources that are available to everyone. But it's still a much more accessible field than ever before in terms of just kind of the raw costs involved. And that is great. It leads to more people from more places, being able to at least explore it and see if it's right for them. And then you know, if they have, if they have the interest to continue, maybe they have more of an opportunity to do so. Whereas in the past it just was was just much more limited to a smaller group of people. This I think the only downside of this, it's not even really a downside. It's just the reality. It is the it is the thing we're like, yes, it means that there are a ton more games. So it is hard for an individual game to get noticed. Because there's so many more out there and so many good ones out there because so many people are so damn talented. But that's I mean, you can't have it both ways. You can't both have it be available to everyone, but then have every game stand out. Or at least I have no imagination for how that would work. So and like like any art form, just having more points of view Whew, going into it just leads to the kind of expansion of what it can be. And that's always been something about games that has fascinated me, you know, I brought up the like Western versus Japanese RPG example. That's a very basic example of like, ostensibly the same genre. But if you've played a Final Fantasy game and like, and like a Elder Scrolls game, those couldn't be more different, even though technically being classified as the same type of genre. So that type of kind of bifurcation can occur on a much more granular level as more people get into game development, because, you know, the the dominant sort of genres, they didn't always, they didn't always exist, it's like, it took someone making Counter Strike, it took someone you know, making Street Fighter two or whatever, like, you know, these their new forms of games just waiting to be discovered. The end, and it's not going to be the big triple A studios that discover them, they cannot afford to take that kind of risk. It will be the small developers who discovered those forums, it's not a it's not a coincidence that I think mods like user created mods like Dota, I mentioned Counter Strike, fortnight, you know, the battle royale game mode, like, these are all things that came from like, random creators somewhere and then, you know, exploded into into these big new forms. So, but not everything, obviously. It's not the goal of the art to just like become the big new thing. Like it's great for, for small and experimental things to exist. Like I said before, it's like it, doesn't it games don't, it's fine for them to not be for everybody. Because there are enough of them out there to where there's like something, something for everyone is out there. But, you know, yeah, I, so I like that, that games could just get more and more, you know, specific and different, and kind of keep going in all these different directions. And that's made possible by different people making them.
  
  Ben 52:16
  So, you know, I'm wondering if you feel comfortable talking about, you started out as a game reviewer working for Gamespot and our KTMB. Magazine? How did your relationship to games? And how did your perspective on games shifts when you moved from kind of critiquing them to kind of working, you know, inside them?
  
  Greg Kasavin 52:37
  Yeah, it didn't. I think my background as a Game Critic, it you know, if nothing else, it helped me have a broad base of of references, like I just was able to justify playing a lot of games, and bouncing from game to game, right? Like, I wouldn't stick to any one game for too long. I just played a big variety. So that's been helpful. Because, you know, when we're thinking about a design feature, and like, how come? No game has done it this way? Before? You know, are there any examples of this? Often I can think of something, and that. But, you know, the other part of my experience that really helped was that Gamespot, even back then I left at the beginning of 2007 is a big website. And a big website is a big piece of software. It has programmers, it has graphic designers. It has producers, it has like a marketing department, so on. And that has a lot of parallels to a big game studio, like at Electronic Arts, which is where I got my first development job. So it was the the transition wasn't too too rough. For me, thankfully. I think I think some of the surprises were that some of the things I didn't really give much thought like some of the things I would have expected to be not that difficult in game development could still be excruciatingly, extraordinarily difficult. The example I think of is like making menus. When you play video games, you don't think too much about the menus, it's, there's some boxes, you move some sliders, you check some stuff on or off. Pretty straightforward. And all games, for the most part games kind of do it all the same way. But I've worked on some projects where literally, the menus were like the most difficult part of the whole thing they got, you know, all the all the gameplay, all the AI all the campaign missions, it's all good, but like, Boy, these menus are just not working. So so that's one of those things where I'm like, wow, I would not have guessed that this would be a thing. But more broadly. I think the real lesson there is that there's no there's no good way to tell what's easy and what's hard and game development and it's very case by case. So that makes it really tough. To plan projects, because even really experienced game developers are like pretty bad at estimating, sometimes. So it's like, if you kind of over schedule your project, you're probably asking for trouble. Our solution there such as it is to like, kind of not over schedule and give ourselves like, a lot of a lot of slack. And just to be open to scoping stuff down. If it's not coming together, it's like because we want to, we want to, we, we would like to finish a game. So we could work on another one, rather than work on the same game forever and ever back to the point of like, you could just work on any game infinitely left to your own devices, I guess.
  
  Phil 55:43
  Yeah, I kind of want to kind of switch gears a little bit to talk about narrative some more, and to get into this great anecdote you have about your parents, and kind of emigrating to Moscow. But before we get there, I thought I just wanted to ask, you know, because you are a games critic, and you've played, you know, so many games, and obviously, now you're making games. What are you finding that you really value and, and narrative and the kinds of stories that you're interested in these days? Like, what's, what's really sticking with you?
  
  Greg Kasavin 56:21
  Um, yeah, that that's an interesting, it's an interesting question, like, in games, I mean, I, I do really appreciate when games just acknowledge the form, like use, take advantage of the part that you're a game, don't just try to muscle your way into being a movie, like if you want to be a movie, make a movie. Like, but I think more and more games, I sort of feel like the days of games strictly trying to be a movie. Like big triple A games sometimes still look that way visually, but I think they are, they very much kind of broaden their horizons and our, you know, the big games do use the form, you know, whether they're nonlinear in some way, or shift perspectives, or kind of any number of things that are kind of uniquely possible. Using games, I look for those elements, like, how is the narrative fitting the structure, though, those things really interest me, because like, you can, you know, you can have those moments of dissonance, where the story is one thing, it may be good in its own right. But the experience of it is like the experience of playing the game is creating one set of feelings. And then the narrative is creating a different set of feelings like that can be interesting. But it can be really special when it's all kind of working together. And if you know, the protagonist, character, the story is going through a miserable time, then something about the play experience is also, you know, reflecting whatever that misery is something like that. Just looking for those moments of intersection between the design and the narrative where it feels like strongly themed and strongly connected, I think that's the stuff that I get the most excited about. But that's, that's like a really, that's a really nonspecific answer. I mean, I just played the game near replicant, I just finished, like, got through the final ending, like, whatever, two days ago. And that's, that's, that's a remake of an old game. But it's kind of like a, you know, it's I think the original game is from roughly 10 years or so ago. And that's an example of a game where it is using the form and, you know, you get one ending, and then you play through a second time and you kind of get new dimensions of the story you sort of get more perspective from, from that you that you didn't take into account before. And it's using it to like, yeah, create this particular emotional experience. So I appreciate what that's doing. Even if it's kind of like a I think more games have done more with that kind of idea since including near automata. The sequel to it. That kind of stuff still really interests me. I guess
  
  Ben 59:21
  I was poking through your blog, truth, love and courage which you stopped reading in, I think, around 2014. So this is very dated, but just thinking about narrative. You had a you had a point in there that you were talking about, basically, that it's like a rolling question whether or not you know, narratives belong in games. And I'm wondering, you know, here we are, you know, seven years later, how do you feel about that question, and maybe how it's changed.
  
  Greg Kasavin 59:48
  I feel exactly the same about it. Narrative is totally optional. Totally, totally optional. games games should not I said it before, like, I really don't think I Personally reject the idea that games like must be some way that there's some format or template for you know what all games must have, they all must have, you know this or that. Or something like that. I do personally happen to believe that narrative can be used to enhance basically any game, anything. Tetris, you name it. Great Tetris is my favorite example of a game that it's one of the greatest games of all time, no story required, or chess. Chess, I think has like, an impression of narrative built into it. Because the pieces are evocative. It's a king and a queen and a bishop. So there's like a story implied in chess, which I find very fascinating. But I, you know, jokingly is semi jokingly, I would say, over the years, like, could chess have like a story driven campaign? Like I like I think it could, I think you could, I think you could have a narrative game based on chess, absolutely. You just have to think about it a certain way. And so, but again, I don't think it's necessary. I just think it's another tool to be used. It's the same as like, you know, the way you design the interactivity itself, the way you design the gameplay, you're, the basic goal of a game is to be engaged with, right, it's like to be played the same way a book is to be read. So narrative can be used to enhance that engagement to make someone more compelled to want to experience the thing in the first place. And then to stick with it once they are already experiencing it. When we were working on Bastion, we had these like, kind of very limited techniques, right? We can't do these big sumptuous, you know, Naughty Dog style cutscenes. That's just completely unavailable to us. But we could use narration that that's sort of cheap and easy, especially if you have a genius voice actor like Logan Cunningham. So by using narration, we could basically instill a sense of meaning that would not otherwise be discernible to the player just from, you know, running around and hitting things with a hammer, we could just make it feel like your actions in the game are more significant than they would be otherwise. So that's, that's the benefit of that, like a narrative can offer a game, I don't think it needs to be like a reward mechanism, necessarily. I think it can be a source of challenge, like in transistor. You know, it's a more I shouldn't use games we've worked on I think, even like the Souls games that you brought up, Philip, like, they don't have these straightforward narratives. They're their narratives are the these things to be like, pieced together and inferred. So it almost to me and the best examples of those games that like becomes a source of challenge in its own right of like, what are all these pieces? And how does it fit together? And that's really interesting. So yeah, it can be it's kind of a microcosm of games as a whole of like, there's no one right way to use narrative in games. But there are many ways that narrative can be used to make games more interesting. I think,
  
  Phil 1:03:30
  you know, we were talking off air about, you know, how you're thinking about about Hades now, and like, what you're now that the game is out, you know, obviously, it's gotten a lot of awards and praise. And, you know, I'd asked you about, you know, an impactful moment relating to that project. And you talked a lot about your family and your family's history. I'm wondering if you could, you know, talk a little bit about that. And if we could dive in there.
  
  Greg Kasavin 1:03:58
  Yeah. Well, to back up, I guess, you know, Hades is the story of a dysfunctional family. It's a it's a big, complicated family, where, you know, these characters are fighting with each other, not just not just in a literal way, but they're, they're very much in conflict with each other as family members. And that's something you know, myself and several of my colleagues, certainly not as expressed in Haiti as the video game. But it's something we could relate to, in our own way of having grown up with with parents with very high expectations, for example, and very different expectations of us than maybe what we ended up being. And in my personal case, I was born in Moscow. I was less than three years old when my family immigrated to the United States to the San Francisco Bay area, so I have no real memory of living and Russia, but but, you know, my, my experience growing up in this country I think was was still very, very much kind of colored by by that, you know, my, my parents didn't know the language they had, I think, you know, a couple of 100 bucks in their pocket, my dad did have a job, you know, he he's an engineer by background, he got a job at like, you know, one of those, like, come to this country and work for Sprint is like a telecom company or something like that. So, he at least had a job, my, my mother is a physician, but she had to redo her whole medical residency, because it's different standards here, you know, from scratch, while learning the language and so on. So, like, I had these kind of very hard working parents, and they, and I think they were under a great deal of pressure that I have an older older brother, you know, they, it's kind of the classic story of, you know, moving to the land of opportunity, wanting to have the bat, you know, set it up so that their children can have the best opportunities growing up, and so on. And, you know, hopefully, you'll both be doctors just like, just like your mom, I ain't a doctor, my brother ain't a doctor. And this was a source of some tension. Growing up. I love we love my parents dearly, we've, since you know, every, everything is good with us and everything, but but, um, if there was a lot of like, it's just kind of that, that that experience of, you know, your parents wanting you to be something, but then your own path sort of leading you somewhere else. And the conflict that can ensue from that. That's something that, you know, I don't, I don't have a, like, my, I don't want to sort of oversell my, my experience growing up, I don't think it was particularly interesting, or anything like that. But but these are things that I, I have my own lived experience around it. That that I could I could channel I think in the work to some extent, and I mentioned, you know, I do think of it's a small point, but I think of Hades as as an immigrant story. Because it I think it literally is one sort of inarguably because hades in the mythology, he's sort of like, he's, he's basically charged with moving to the underworld and supervising it, he's not from there. He moved there to take a job. And, and he had a son there, and stuff like that. And he had to, he had to sort of work he had to ingratiate himself to the the characters who are like native to the underworld, who are who are from there who have their own culture and are born there. And then, you know, try to try to raise a kid there. So like, that's, that's a part of that felt it felt real to me. My I felt a connection to it in that way. And it just, I, you know, I think since you've since you've played Hades, like Yeah, it's about Gods and stuff. But of course, we're very interested in like, the human qualities of these characters and making them flaws. And All right, so trying to make these gods the humanity of the gods, I think is like, what's there, you know, even in the, even in the classical mythology, that is the source material for this game, it's like what's always been compelling about them, it's not their amazing powers, it's the fact that they are this kind of like bickering family with a lot of flaws. So that's the part that we wanted to kind of dig into and, and find these sort of personal connections to as we went,
  
  Phil 1:08:34
  Yeah, it's interesting, hearing your analysis of the story, because I feel like everybody I know, who's, like grown up in the US kind of has memories from like, elementary school of reading the old, like, Greek myths in some fashion, or at least I do. But to be honest, it's, it's, I never really thought much of, of the gods and like a family aspect. I always kind of viewed them as in that God the way the here's like this one, God, and here's their interesting power. And, you know, the game does a really good job of like, using the balloons and things like that, to emulate that. But thinking about the familial dynamics of it, especially in relation to immigration and, and traversal of different environments is really, really fascinating to me.
  
  Greg Kasavin 1:09:28
  Thanks. I think it's the difference between, like adaptations of Greek myth, versus the source material where, you know, if you read if you read like the Iliad, or something like that, that is just, it's the Trojan War, where the gods themselves have literally kind of split off into warring. They're like, on opposite sides of this war. They're like fighting with each other. So it's, I think it's all there. It's just you know, you don't necessarily, you don't necessarily dig into too much Bit like the I think I just took an interest in it. Maybe I don't know, I don't know why I observed that aspect of it there. I think it is there. But I know I know what you mean that the powers of course stand out. It's like Poseidon, you know, he can command the seas and move mountains and stuff like that. But it was the part where like, for me, I think from a young age, it's like, wait a minute, Aphrodite is married to have Festus. But then has an affair with Arias like, this is like, woof. This is it's like, you know, it's like a soap opera type stuff like there's and then the more you know about zoos, the more you know, he is not the kind of benevolent patriarch that he is often portrayed to be in modern adaptations, where I feel like he often gets conflated with kind of capital G biblical God is like this kind of, you know, this, this wise, you know, knowing guy who's looking out for everybody, it's like, dude, that is just, that is just not how the myths go. Zeus is someone with completely unchecked power. And it's, he's very interesting in that regard. It's like, what if there were no consequences for anything you did? What would you do? You would maybe you'd be kind of like Zeus. Hopefully not, but like, it's understandable that he would be the way he is as, as the king of the gods. And those are, you know, the, the fascinating myths of are the ones where these gods, you know, down the line, they, they do some really terrible things. And, and it's, I always found it sort of a fascinating window into the kind of ancient Greek worldview, one that I kind of relate to, it's a, it's easy to understand why it was an appealing way of looking at the world, because it's like, it's a way of rationalizing that bad things can happen for no reason, at any time, which is, I think, many people's lived reality. And I think it's easier to accept that the gods don't care about you at all, then they love you very much. They just happen to do this terrible, terrible thing to you, but it's because they love you, you know. But that's not it. People should believe what they what they believe, of course,
  
  Ben 1:12:22
  there's a couple of reviews of the game that I've seen that have kind of latched on to the this idea of like, it's about, you know, trying to leave an abusive or an unhealthy kind of family relationship, and kind of how hard that can be. And I'm wondering, yeah, do you see it kind of sounds like you're saying, you know, that's there. I'm wondering if you see that as explicit. And you know, whether or not that's, yeah, important kind of understanding the game.
  
  Greg Kasavin 1:12:46
  Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think it's explicit. I mean, the first thing, Hades says to Zacharias, is he calls him stupid, you know, that's not something that's not like the signs of a healthy relationship between a father and a son.
  
  Unknown Speaker 1:13:01
  Stupid boy, I told you nobody gets out of here, whether alive or dead. How was your wanton ransacking of my boomerang?
  
  Unknown Speaker 1:13:13
  Greetings, father, Moran second was a delight. Thank you for asking. So I'll just be on my way again.
  
  Unknown Speaker 1:13:21
  Be on your way indeed. What do I care, you shall never reach the surface. Go see for yourself.
  
  Greg Kasavin 1:13:31
  You know, abusive is, is a very charged word. And, and it can have a wide range of meaning. And Hades as abuse has its limits. But it doesn't mean it's not abuse, in a way. So and and yeah, I mean, it's a game about or I mean, the story. Absolutely. You know, I don't, I think part of what was so compelling to me about you, again, it's back to the gods in general, but hades in particular. It's like he's he's often painted as as, as the villain, right? And Disney's Hercules and I think many modern adaptations, just, it's like, he's the he's the guy in the underworld, it's easy to just associate him with being the bad guy and Zeus as being the good guy. But the reality of the classical mythology is that they're all pretty complicated and, and if anything, Hades is one of the better ones on paper. So just playing into the idea that he's a villain, but but just trying to paint him as a as a complicated guy, like you don't have to like him. You just want just maybe you end up understanding him a bit better. You don't have to like condone any of his behavior or his actions, you should just at least see why he made the mistakes that he made. And I think I don't I think that's yeah, for me, it's like I've never I it's not like a goal to Write, quote likeable characters. It's just like, like it's, I think good characters are, are empathetic characters, you just have to understand them whether they're a protagonist or an antagonist. So just setting up this like pretty. Just really fraught relationship dislike busted straight up broken relationship between the Father and the Son and then going like, Well, where can this go? And the, you know, Hades resolves has an optimistic tone, which was very, very important to me, we wanted to make a game that was more upbeat, I wanted to make a game that essentially had a happy ending. And it was challenging to reconcile a happy ending from from this kind of starting point. But that is part of the fun of seeing, like, Can you can you even get there? I think one of the reasons it can work out. It's not, it's not meant to be like a prescriptive thing of like, oh, you know, every every abusive relationship can be resolved. It's like, that's not, that's, of course, not true. But with the gods, they have unlimited time. That's one of the key differences between the gods and the rest of us. They have unlimited time, they literally can't even kill each other to solve their problems. They have a really good incentive to work their problems out as long as it takes, because otherwise, they're stuck. Otherwise, they're stuck with these, you know, anyone would prefer a good relationship to a bad one. So if you have unlimited time, why not work to try and improve things? That's one of the kinds of things I was I was thinking about. That made sense to me. Like in the in the context of, of that game story? Yeah.
  
  Phil 1:16:46
  Yeah. That yeah, for me playing to the game. And Zachary is is such a, an interesting, you know, character to be to be playing as and if I'm not mistaken. He's you all created Zach. Reyes, he's not based off of a
  
  Greg Kasavin 1:17:01
  no, oh, no, we didn't. He he is. Yeah, the he is from, like, the idea that Hades had a son called Sagittarius comes from classical mythology. But I had never heard of him before this project. I found that there's very little known about Zacharias. And that was part of the appeal. And in fact, what is known about jaggery is there's like, highly contradictory stuff. And like, there's one version of him where he's the proto Dionysus, and it's this weird story. That doesn't make any sense. Honestly, like, forgive the blasphemy to the gods. And then, and then there's the version where he is the son of Hades, but then nothing else is known about him. And I'm like, what, Hades had a son, I had no idea. And that that was so compelling that we built a whole game off of like, sort of approaching it as like, the true story of what happened as it were trying to sort of triangulate between that idea that he had a son. And then the one kind of relatively well known myth about Hades about a how, how the seasons came to be and stuff like
  
  Ben 1:18:08
  that. How did you how did you find out about Zachary is
  
  Greg Kasavin 1:18:11
  just I mean, in my, in my research of Greek myth, I was actually researching the Theseus and the Minotaur myth, specifically at the time, but researching Greek myth, just in general, just reading a lot of stuff. Read it, because, yeah, reading about Haiti is reading about the other gods. It's like, you know, reading about the they're the sort of family tree, the genealogy, it's like, Wait, I thought, like I said, I, I thought Hades didn't have any kids. It's like, wait a minute what he does, so that yeah, that's it. That little tidbit of information. It's like from a play the Abbot, one of his books, hear the Greek Greek poet Escalus has has like a long lost, you know, fragments of some play. He wrote about Sisyphus, where it alludes to you know, Sisyphus, seeing Zacharias who's identified as the son of Hades there so it's like, whoa, that's that's cool. What's what's that about? How come nobody knows about this guy? Yeah.
  
  Phil 1:19:15
  Zachary is was just such a like, likable, likable character. And I love I think a lot of this conversation has revolved around, you know, interactive fiction, and also like the importance of narrative as just a tool to allow, you know, to elicit some kind of response from a player in a game. And I think that, you know, everything from the story to the music to the actual gameplay systems showcase, that what I would call the negotiation of difference within you know, family dynamics. And if I could just go back to for for one last thing for your, for your blog, I love this quote that you had talking about, you know, the importance of, of narrative to be active, and you say, I got into game development, because I was interested in speaking through my actions, having spent a long time speaking mostly through words, in my previous line of work, it turns out, I need the balance, it's important to me to keep writing, as part of what I do. Writing for me is a form of exorcism. It's a way of heating the voice. That's never steered me wrong. You know, I love this quote. And I love this distinction between speaking through actions versus your words. I think it's an interesting insight into the differences for writing games versus other mediums. And to close us out, you know, I'd love for you to just talk a little bit about, you know, now that you've been making games for over over 10 years now. You know, what's kind of been the biggest thing that you've learned or what something that you're that you've been thinking a lot about, that you've learned through the process of writing these these interactive stories?
  
  Greg Kasavin 1:21:12
  Yeah, thank you for that. First of all, I still absolutely see the exorcism thing I still think about often it's like writing is not it's not necessarily pleasant. While you're doing it, you don't you often don't feel good about it after it's done. So it's like, why, why? Why do you do it, I think a lot of writers have this sort of shared misery around it, and you, you got to just have to get it out of your system sometimes. And for me, it's like, I become very invested in, in the characters that I'm writing, and they become, they become, like my friends, or people I care about. They're not always my friends, because some of them are not good people or whatever, but I still care about them, I feel for them. And I want, and I'm the one who's standing between, you know, their story, existing and not existing. So it becomes almost this, this process of kind of transcription, once I have like a thorough understanding of a character. I just, you know, what they would say, in a certain situation becomes more second nature. To me, it's like, well, of course, they would act this way. You know, given these set of circumstances. But I think, I think what I I mean, I don't know what I'm still learning all the time, I don't feel more proficient at the stuff now than when I started. Overall, it's like, which is like a kind of a brutal contrast to me versus being a Game Critic where it's not, you know, I think Gamespot was, was a was a rigorous job. And it was still very difficult for me at the end, but I felt, I think I felt a level of proficiency at what I was doing. Toward the end of my time at GameSpot. Whereas with game development, it's like, oh, boy, everything is like a lot of it is an uphill battle all the time. I'm and always a moving target. But I think that's what keeps it so compelling. I think I spoke to one of the, one of my biggest learnings, though earlier, which is, which is that, which is that part of like really, really consciously accepting that the team must come first, before before any individual desires, if you're working as part of a team, and that's, I don't know why it took me that long. Like, it's very obvious, maybe I should have played more team sports as a kid or something like that, to really internalize that sooner. Apologies, barking dogs. The sorry. But, you know, when when you work, when you work with really talented people, if they can be fired up and enthusiastic about what they're doing? You're in a really, you're in the best possible position, then, basically, because yeah, when it comes to making games, it's really difficult. So the best chance you have is to like, be genuinely excited about what you're doing. Because that's going to, that's going to motivate you, that's going to give you the motivation to want to do kind of go the extra mile with it to like, fully explore the idea.
  
  And that may lead to the best possible game, because I, I've also, you know, often this goes, this takes me back to to my Gamespot days. I've felt this for a long time. But with games, it's sort of paradoxically it's the it's the small unimportant stuff. I think that makes games really special. But in order for the small unimportant stuff to resonate The foundational stuff has to be there in a, in a good state. So it's those games that sort of take things beyond a reasonable, extreme or just have like ultra specific delightful details of like, why did they do this? This is ridiculous. But I love it. Like those kinds of moments and games, I think make for. They make for the best games when you're playing them. And they make for things that you remember, years down the line, like you take your favorite game, when I think like a Resident Evil four or something like that, I don't remember, you know, hour 30 I don't remember every level of that game or something like that. Or Metroid Prime. These are games I loved in my game, in my Gamespot days. But I remember certain moments, I remember the feeling that they created and certain kinds of excessive details about them, you know, Metroid Prime you fire you know, you're sort of powered up energy weapon and you'd see Sam Mrs. You know, face reflected in her own visor, that is strictly an unnecessary detail. And Metroid Prime, nobody needed to do that the game would have been the same exact game without that detail. But no, it wouldn't have been right, because that's the one detail of Metroid Prime I'm talking about now, more than, you know, whatever, 10 years after the fact. So it's the small unimportant stuff. But in order to do the small, unimportant stuff, you have to like, want to do it, and have the time to do it. And that all that stuff is, is hard. So yeah, it I think we've gotten better working together as a team. But we're always still learning all the time. We're still always negotiating to use that word again. And trying to figure out what really drives one another man that I don't imagine will ever sort of get to the finish line of that process. But hopefully we can inch our way closer from from game to game.
  
  Ben 1:27:01
  Greg, we've covered a lot of ground. And thank you so much for being gracious with your time. Is there? Is there something we didn't ask you that you want to touch on?
  
  Greg Kasavin 1:27:09
  Nothing jumps to mind offhand, though, thank you, I think I think the main thing for me is just to once again, express my, my gratitude for for our players who've helped make Hades a success and who've who've been there really every step of the way for each of our games, because we you know, we were a small independent studio, our projects are all self funded. It is like by the grace, by the grace of our players that were able to keep going. And the support for Hades was just like a really big vote of confidence for us in our approach. And we want to keep going and I hope whatever we come up with next we'll will live up to our past work for those who have enjoyed this game.
  
  Ben 1:27:54
  Okay. Hey, thank you for taking the time to talk to us today. Sure. Yeah, my pleasure.
  
  Greg Kasavin 1:27:59
  Thank you.
  
  Phil 1:28:20
  Yeah, so that was our conversation with Greg cassava. And, man, it was such an interesting interview for me to rethink how I view narrative and games and that it can just be a tool or an ends to a means to, to make the things that we love and not feel like it's compromised, you know?
  
  Ben 1:28:43
  Yeah. And I, you know, I think this is like, this is a bigger conversation that I think we've started to have around the games that we really love, which is like, yeah, like, what's a what's a workplace like? And what's it going to be like? And how comfortable do we feel, you know, playing these these massive games that are made under these conditions that like, you don't always know, or you sometimes do know what, it's not great. And so I think like, he just has a great perspective on like, yeah, how to, like, both kind of love the job that you're doing, and feel really passionate about it without like, letting it consume you in this in this kind of way that it definitely can.
  
  Phil 1:29:25
  Yeah, and I mean, I think we can't deny that neither of us expected the response we would get from Greg about you know, how he's viewing the story of Hades in relation to his family's immigration story from from Moscow, like when when he sent you know, just for full transparency Greg had kind of given us a little bit of an idea of that prior to the interview and just, it was it felt like I had found like a us you know, I don't know just like a priceless treasure like I never would have expected that kind of perspective on Hades as a character in Greek myth, kind of being this emigrate this immigrant character and this emigration narrative.
  
  Ben 1:30:11
  Yeah. And like, honestly, just like thank you to him for, for sharing that with us.
  
  Phil 1:30:16
  For sure. Well, yeah, so if you want to see more of Greg's work, then you can check out more Supergiant Games. Or you can follow him on Twitter at cassava in and where can they find you then
  
  Ben 1:30:31
  they can find me at sad underscore, radio underscore lad.
  
  Phil 1:30:35
  And you can find me at 3d Cisco. And you can find the show at origin story underscore on Twitter, or at our website origin story dot show.
  
  Ben 1:30:48
  Huge thank you to Ryan Hopper for providing the music for the show and to melody Hirsch for the cover art.
  
  Phil 1:30:56
  And if you all have questions, concerns, ideas about the show if you want to, you know, give us some ideas of who we might interview next. Or if there's some kind of game or movie book, whatever it may be that you think we should check out. We'd love to hear it, you can email us at the origin story pod@gmail.com. And as always, if you have a favorite sandwich or you want to tell us about your favorite food, we can expand our horizons
  
  Ben 1:31:26
  or make you know what let's hear about hotdog toppings like what do you put on a hotdog to make that good? You know? Well,
  
  Phil 1:31:32
  I mean, first off, you have to start off with a hot dog. But I don't know if Ben does anything. I
  
  Ben 1:31:37
  mean, let's say you can do you can do a vegan dog. It'll be just fine.
  
  Phil 1:31:40
  All right. That's another podcast so we will see you all again here shortly with the next interview.
  
  Ben 1:31:50
  Bye. Peace. Farewell. Best of luck. Goodbye