Breathing Life into Greek Myth: The Dialogue of 'Hades'

In this 2021 GDC session, Supergiant Games’ Darren Korb and Greg Kasavin break down how an independent studio with fewer than 20 employees managed to release a fully voiced video game with more than 22,000 lines of dialogue—during a global pandemic.

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[TalkerDudeMan]

13:08 One of the first things i really noticed about with Zagreus was that he was soft-spoken and polite to almost everyone except Hades. Even Sisyphus, a shade he has no reason to respect or be kind to, he calls sir. It was really endearing.

[fawfulmark]

GDC talk about how they made the dialogue for Hades?
Yup, instant click.

[JosephAlanMeador]

What an incredible game, one of the best ever made in my opinion. I had no idea Zagreus was voiced by the sound designer, most impressive.

[dauphinkivol]

My personnal top 3 about this wonderful game :
-Megera's voice
-Destroying Theseus in dozens of creative ways
-Bouldy

[cereusfox]

LOL THE FISH PART I COULDN'T STOP REPLAYING IT THE WAY YOU CAN HEAR GREG'S SOUNDING MORE AND MORE INCREDULOUS

[kyleradue]

You believe in Bouldy, and Bouldy believes in you.

[AshtarteD]

Darren Korb continues to be my favorite living composer. Which says a fucking lot given how many amazing composers are out there, especially working in videogames like Hitoshi Sakimoto, Yasunori Mitsuda, Shoji Meguro, Keiichi Okabe, Austin Wintory, Martin O'Donnell and so many more. As much as I listen to those other composers and adore their work Korb continues to be the one to impress me the most.

[BrightBlueInk]

I will say, as someone who played from about a month after early access launch to 1.0, they really did an impressive job making those Yeti Snowballs sound good. Part of this might be because I played EA on PC (with headphones) and launch on Switch (usually handheld, not always on good headphones), but even then, without just remembering how early I heard the line, I don't think I could tell you what was recorded in the studio VS what was recorded at the actor's home. Great job Supergiant!

[jonathanjollimore]

Very cool roguelike and coming back to talk to everyone is really enjoyable so those restarts feel rewarding

[bradyfractal]

You guys are such a gift to humanity. The fact that you take the time to share so much of your amazing studio is invaluable ❤

[Red_PlaysYT]

Working on 100%ing Hades right now such a perfect time to release this video :D

[Cypeq]

Supergiant is one of my favourite game developers I discovered supergiant late... Actually played 2 of their games without associating them with the studio.
Then I played hades and i was shocked how great it was. I'm like who are those people, this is best game in the genre and one of the best overall, everything was checking very good and exceptional boxes. And then i see it, bastion, transistor... OMG games i really liked.
Those guys consistently were able to deliver very good game one after another, never missing a mark.
So far Hades is their Magnum opus, but by no means it should cast a shadow on the other ones. They always deliver on art, story telling, voice overs, music and gameplay. They make smaller scope games with such a love for the craft and quality of them just shows it.
Thank you supergiant keep doing what you do!

[RglMrn]

Incredible job. Thanks a lot for the talk!

[Gingrnut]

Loving this presentation so far, as soon as I started Hades I was impressed with the dialogue, and after eventually diving into the credits was very impressed with Darren as Zag. However, as a British person, it’s very funny to describe the voice Darren is doing for Zag as British, because it’s really not. It reads mostly to me as a slightly soft Aussie accent, and I’m surprised Darren is American, because it sounds very authentically Australian. I suppose some of the inflections are British, but maybe in a middle class, educated at Oxford expat Australian kind of way. Anyway, fascinating to get this kind of background on the writing & voices.

[therupoe]

Had no idea Logan was the voice of the announcer in Pyre! That's crazy!

[mercurymorning]

This is so great to get an insight into this process! I’m so intrigued how it worked re: acting scenes, I take it everyone is voicing their lines separately & I wonder how they made the dialogue match up so perfectly so that the characters sound like they’re actually reacting to each other, when they may not have heard the other actor’s performance? I wonder if they ever had to go back and re record lines if it sounds too weird, or if they ever had two actors in the booth at the same time. I suppose in the game there aren’t so many long “scenes” so maybe they didn’t encounter this problem

[Inogat]

so how do you make a video game where the characters have a lot of dialog options and voice lines and it never feels repetitive?
You record and write and implement a hellish ton of them!!! This is crazy but also the greatest.

[Dylen]

Amazing talk about one of my favorite games ever. Seriously would drop everything to go work with you guys.

[holdmybrickplease]

The constant praise for Logan is so sweet considering the history and obviously he deserves all of it

[xTobsecretx]

Sweet that Greg gave a shoutout to PeopleMakeGames’ video on Hades’ dialogue system