Five Years On, The Hades Fanbase Built Its Own Greek Mythology

Hades is celebrating its 10-year anniversary today, September 17, 2025. Below, we examine ho the fan community has made the game and Greek mythology its own with a vibrant fiction and mod community.

For many people, Greek mythology begins and ends with a few familiar faces. The musclebound hero–known as Hercules or Heracles–has had tales of his exploits retold for centuries through books, and more recently through movies, TV shows, and Michael Bolton’s stellar singing.

Beyond him, most modern audiences recognize the broadest strokes: Zeus as the thunder-wielding king of the gods, Hades as the grim lord of the dead, and other recognizable figures like Poseidon, Athena, Icarus, and Apollo. This pop-culture shorthand distills a vast and intricate body of myth into a handful of archetypes. The pantheon of Olympus, and the sprawling tales around it, contain thousands of figures whose influence never reached the same cultural spotlight.

That gap in popular imagination is part of what made Hades, Supergiant Games’ 2020 roguelike, so refreshing. Rather than centering Zeus, Poseidon, or Hercules, the game puts Zagreus–an obscure son of Hades–front and center. Instead of repeating myths we’ve heard countless times, Hades introduces players to a story about family, rebellion, and perseverance, told through the eyes of a character with very little mythological baggage. It’s a narrative decision that re-energized Greek mythology for a new audience while giving fans the inspiration to continue exploring those margins.

Hades thrives on nuance. Its take on the Greek pantheon is playful, argumentative, and deeply human. Gods bicker like siblings and show flashes of pettiness and pride. The game reimagines familiar figures while elevating lesser-known ones, weaving a new canon of myth through the very structure of a roguelike. Dying over and over isn’t failure–it’s the point, mirroring the endless cycles and reincarnations so common in ancient stories.

That near-endless cycle of death pushed players to spend more and more time in the House of Hades, Tartarus, and the other areas beneath the surface and a small portion of those players have added their own take on the extended roster of Mount Olympus.

“Hey ZagZag,” Apollo tells Zagreus in an encounter made possible by the OlympusExtra mod. “You don’t mind me calling you ZagZag, right? Because if you do, you better come tell me face to face.”

OlympusExtra adds Apollo, Hestia, Hephaestus, and Hera–a few of the gods absent from the main Hades experience–in the form of new boons, voice lines, and art. The mod imagines stories for each and where they might be during the events of Hades as Zagreus tries to uncover the secrets about his family by forcibly escaping from hell.

“We’ve actually made OlympusExtra such that you can play it from the get-go,” said mod co-creator physiXPlays in a Reddit comment. “There’s some story dialogue and whatnot that integrates into the rest of the events. [Our additional gods] even comment on some things when you progress the story.”

Hundreds of other fans have tried their hands at recreating Supergiant Games’ art style with their depictions of Hera, Hercules, and other characters from Greek mythology, like Lype and Keres. Many of those depictions have taken liberties in how ancient texts and stories describe them.

The environment in Hades, despite torturers like Megaera roaming the halls, feels welcoming and full of life. That type of home has pushed players to put their own original creations–often extensions of themselves with fantastical art–within the House of Hades. Many view Supergiant’s take on Dionysus, Aphrodite, and Ares as friends of their own.

Hades became one of the most successful indie games of all time. By early 2021, it had sold over a million copies, eventually reaching millions more thanks to ports across nearly every major platform–including Netflix’s mobile app. Critical acclaim was immediate, and in 2021, the game became the first video game ever to win a Hugo Award, one of literature’s highest honors. That recognition wasn’t just for its gameplay but for its writing, which turned an underworld escape story into a meditation on grief, resilience, and complicated family ties.

Five years later and fans are still fighting through the fields of Elysium, aiming to reach the surface–even if Persophene hasn’t been there, waiting for them, in some time. Conversations had with gods and other figures throughout Hades–including the likes of Sisyphus and Achilles–feel real.

Part of the reason Supergiant Games has returned to Greek mythology with Hades 2 is that there are so many more stories to tell. The team brought in Apollo and Hestia, fulfilling the longheld dreams of the creators of OlympusExtra, among dozens of other new characters like Melinoë.

“Like her brother Zagreus from the original game, Melinoë is not a character of our own invention, and is based on an ancient Underworld deity thought to be related to Hades,” read an official development blog from Supergiant games. “What little ancient mythology exists about her was more than enough to make us want to explore her story and connection to her family, and in so doing, expand on our vision of the Underworld.”

In a way, the stories around the gods of Mount Olympus are among the oldest and best-known versions of a family soap opera. There is drama, sometimes unnecessarily, around every corner, but the stakes are much higher than anything we’d see on Days of Our Lives. Kidnappings, secret family members, and even cannibalism fill the chapters of the Greek pantheon.

Hades gave us one of the most approachable and interactive versions of some of those stories that we’ve ever seen. We’re still seeing it unfold now in both Hades 2 and the many fan additions adding gods and mortals, both old and new, to the family.