Introduction: The Sound and Music of Hades Free

Supergiant Games’ 2020 Hades is one of the most critically acclaimed games of recent years. Its significance is evidenced by various accolades, a large and enthusiastic player base and fan culture, and, most recently, the announcement and development of a sequel (available in early access at the time of this publication). At the same time, Hades is in many ways an unusual game, a compelling combination of disparate elements. It is a game of intersections: in its status as a rogue-lite dungeon crawler that combines repeating gameplay loops with an unfolding story; in its genre-crossing musical score, which composer Darren Korb has described as “Mediterranean prog-rock Halloween”;¹ and in its presentation of ancient Greek myth, which retells canonical stories while extracting distinctly modern themes from its sources, including portraying diversity in gender, sexuality, and race. It is, in short, one of the most innovative games of recent years, one deserving of study and scholarly attention.

This special issue presents a combination of five double-blind peer-reviewed articles as well as an interview with the game’s composer, Darren Korb. Both the articles and the composer interview include a diverse range of approaches to the music of this multifaceted game, examining how the sound and music of Hades reflect, negotiate, and form its gameplay experience. The sound and music of Hades, which facilitates a gameplay experience that is both playfully fulfilling and emotionally moving, is at once incredibly complex and eminently cohesive. The five research articles and one interview in this issue seek to form a basis for further ludomusicological study of Hades, its sequel(s), and other games that deal with repetition, narrative, and/or myth. At the same time, the diversity of these articles, covering fields of study from metrical analysis to narratology, and topics from classical literature to gender and internet culture studies, indicate the extent to which Hades rewards scholarly investigation.

As with many video games, the music of Hades varies depending on both the player-protagonist’s location in game-space and -time as well as on the game state. It will therefore be helpful for the reader of this special issue to have a general understanding of Hades’s overarching plot and narrative structure. The form of the game, whose relationship to the game’s music is of particular note to Stephanie Lind and Silvia Mantilla-Wright in their respective articles, also nuances how the music is understood in context.

Hades follows its protagonist, Zagreus, as he attempts to escape the mythical ancient Greek Underworld, the domain of his father, Hades. Helped by the gods of Olympus, and interacting with notable characters from Greek mythology, he repeatedly fights through four layers of the Underworld (termed ‘biomes’) and a final ‘boss fight’ battle with his father Hades in order to reach the surface and reunite with his mother Persephone.

The game formally functions as a “rogue-lite.” Rogue-lites are a subgenre of the original term “rogue-like,” named after the seminal 1980 title Rogue. Rogue-likes proceed from the design principle that when the player-character inevitably dies in the course of gameplay, the player is returned to the beginning of the game with all progress lost. The rogue-like is thus designed around repeating “runs” of the game. In each run, players gain more abilities or equipment and typically attain further goals until their journey ends and they must start again, losing all such gained abilities, equipment, and previously achieved goals. Both narrative and gameplay progression are thus locked to individual runs; while evidence of previous runs might persist (finding the body of a former player-character, for instance) there is no form of significant macro-progression.

A rogue-lite, on the other hand, is often defined as a variant of a rogue-like where progression is conserved between runs in some form. In Slay the Spire (2019), for instance, the player slowly unlocks new, more powerful cards for their characters to find in their runs, and in Risk of Rain 2 (2019), the player unlocks new weapons, items, and characters. This adaptation to the gameplay loop allows for the kind of macro-progression that would be constrained by the rogue-like form. In Hades, Zagreus slowly becomes more powerful by upgrading his weapons and unlocking new skills, but he also progresses the game’s various small- and large-scale narratives through his interactions with the various denizens of the House of Hades. Hades thus presents a less common example of rogue-lite macro-progression that pertains to elements beyond the mechanical.

Defining the narrative structure for a game such as Hades is challenging, since any two players will take different amounts of time and a different number of runs to progress through the stages of the story. There are certain milestones in Hades, however, that significantly change the narrative context of play and broadly split the game into three acts. The First Act spans from the beginning of the game to the first time Zagreus vanquishes Hades and encounters his mother on the surface. As Zagreus learns that he is bound by fate to the Underworld and cannot remain on the surface for long, the game moves into the Second Act, during which the player repeats their escape attempts until they succeed a further nine times. The Third Act begins after this successful tenth run, when Persephone returns to the Underworld with Zagreus and reunites with Hades. From there, the player attempts further runs, working to the ultimate goal of reconciling the gods of Olympus with the gods of the Underworld. The Third Act concludes with a banquet that restores peace between the pantheons, and is followed by a functionally infinite post-game where players can attempt more runs of increasing difficulty, complete any unfinished side-quests, and continue interacting with and developing relationships with characters.

Each of the articles in this special issue examines how these aspects of narrative intersect with the stylistic and formal properties of the game’s music, as well as player identity. Stephanie Lind, for instance, in “Motivic Repetition and Pseudo-Looping in Hades as Rogue-Lite Elements,” argues that there is a larger-scale parallelism between game mechanics, setting, narrative, and musical structure in Hades. Adapting Karen Collins’ approach to analyzing looping structure, Lind demonstrates that looping within several of the game’s battle room tracks occurs at multiple levels (Collins’s microloop, mesoloop, and macroloop), but that this looping is not simply an exact duplication of musical materials: instead, a pseudo-looping process subtly introduces variation to musical themes. Such variation suggests connections to the rogue-lite genre’s reiterative gameplay structure, but also the metal genre: pulling from scholarship by Gregory McCandless and Jonathan Pieslak, her analysis demonstrates how the musical scoring exploits metal’s characteristic rhythmic and metric instabilities while simultaneously creating a sense of musical stasis through motivic repetition.

Daniel Carpenter’s article “It’s ‘In the Blood’: Hades’s Signature Song and the Transcendence of Genre” examines how Hades’s end-credits song transgresses binaries in multiple ways: through ambiguities in its harmonic structure, in its trans-diegetic presence within the game, and in its evocation of timbral signifiers from multiple musical genres including symphonic rock and heavy metal. In this transcending of genres, the song manifests composer Darren Korb’s “Mediterranean prog-rock Halloween” aesthetic. This ultimately leads to a transcending of medium as well: as Carpenter argues the song exists as a work of video game music while simultaneously transcending that label by its association with musical genres outside of the game. He concludes that the song thereby presents a message of unity, a resolution of tensions established earlier in the soundtrack, and thus a satisfying conclusion to the game’s narrative.

In “Eurydice Sings: Revoicing a Musical Myth in Hades,” Demetrius Shahmehri continues the examination of the game’s original mythological context, in this case by detailing the ways that Hades inverts traditional tellings of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. He explores how Eurydice’s signature song, “Good Riddance,” counteracts previous retellings of the myth in opera and games by disrupting the broader game rhythm, as well as its forward-oriented temporality. In doing this, Hades flips the Orphic myth by encouraging players to stop, listen, and not look at her. Drawing on the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin on polyphonic texts and Michel Chion on voice, Shahmehri suggests that Hades transforms Eurydice from her previous passive role in the myth into an agential, authorial voice.

Shifting from the mythological past to the personal present, Sarah Pozderac-Chenevey’s article “They Sound Hot: Sexuality and Vocality in Supergiant’s Hades” studies the game’s depiction of queerness, emphasizing not only the content of the game itself but also how fans have enthusiastically embraced the characters’ sexual appeal, visually and through vocality. Delving into scholarship in queer theory by Tim Summers, Adrienne Shaw, Bonnie Ruberg, and others, Pozderac-Chenevey argues that the game manifests what she terms both-and, with Zagreus refusing to settle into fixed binaries. This avoidance of strict binaries manifests both narratively and ludically: for instance, Zagreus fights to escape his father’s prescriptions but always returns home, and the game gives players the option of pursuing relationships simultaneously with multiple characters of different sexualities. Pozderac-Chenevey views the game’s both-and approach as a desire to live otherwise, tying into the game’s depictions of bisexuality, and suggests that the player’s ability to take on the identities of these queer characters allows them to consider alternate identities for themselves as well. Such freedom of identity is embraced by fans through their creation of erotic fan art, which the author uses as a case study to discuss Hades’s rejection of compulsory heterosexuality.

Finally, we felt it appropriate to situate Silvia Mantilla-Wright’s article on death—the most final of endings—last in this special issue. In “‘There is No Escape’: Hades and the Apotheosis of Death in Music,” they examine the multi-faceted role of death within the game. Often positioned as an obstacle in video games, here mortality is instead positioned as a major narrative principle. Mantilla-Wright’s analysis is grounded in semiotics and thanatology to contextualize Hades’s unique repositioning of these cultural themes through several musical case studies related to death in the soundtrack: while this factors into the game’s narrative in obvious ways, less obvious facets including ritual and transformation, factor into how players understand the game’s repetitive structure as well as its music. Furthermore, their article links these semiotic observations to musical representations of death referencing the work of authors such as Janieke Bruin-Mollenhorst, illustrating how tonal centers, timbre, and the game’s prominent heavy metal aesthetics both clarify and transmute the player’s understanding of its narrative.

Many common threads will begin to emerge as the reader progresses through this special issue. Articles by Carpenter, Lind, and Mantilla-Wright all cite Korb’s suggestion that the music of Hades might be best described as “maybe Mediterranean prog-rock Halloween.” Korb’s comment suggests the multiplicity of genres within the soundtrack, and articles take these three rich signifiers in different directions. Mantilla-Wright observes that Korb’s invented genre implies a fusion of what they call a “thrice-dead” musical aesthetic that embraces ancient Greece, Hell, and Halloween. Carpenter takes up Korb’s suggestion to explore how the game’s music represents a light, Tim-Burton-esque view of the macabre: for him, representations of the “Mediterranean,” in the soundtrack’s use of Turkish instruments such as the lavta and bağlama, come to stand in specifically for ancient Greece. Lind cites “Mediterranean prog-rock Halloween” as the prevailing tone of the soundtrack, exploring the prog-rock elements in conjunction with metal. This collective fascination with Korb’s ad hoc description of his style for Hades indicates interest in the soundtrack’s complexity, and points to the analytic and interpretive depths it promises.

Korb leaves one critical style, metal, out of his invented genre. Korb intentionally uses heavy metal as a genre to signify death and Hell: several articles note Korb’s remark that “metal comes from Hell, everyone knows this.”² This is achieved not, like many metal songs, through the use of text evoking these themes, but instead through timbre/instrumentation, musical irregularities, sonic density, and other features. Carpenter, Lind, and Mantilla-Wright discuss the formal aspects of these musical features: Carpenter outlines how the music’s inherent metal features allow it to function as a metal song outside of the game’s narrative context, Lind examines how rhythmic distortions common to metal reflect the varied repetition of the game’s rogue-lite structure, and Mantilla-Wright explains how structural features such as the songs’ tonal centers, texture, and harmonic stability closely link to the game as well as the metal genre’s overall themes of death.

As these abundant signifiers suggest, the soundtrack of Hades is full of possibilities for semiotic analysis. Semiotic readings leave room for players to use their own interpretation of signs within the music to derive meaning. Shahmehri considers Eurydice’s song “Good Riddance” as a sonic sign, and explores how this song’s unexpected and initially unexplained appearance forces players into a moment of critical listening and interpretation. Mantilla-Wright analyzes the soundtrack’s use of repetition to establish semiotic meaning, using hermeneutic text from thanatological studies to recontextualize the ludic significance of certain musical pieces and how this reinforces the messaging from the game’s wider emotional narrative. “God of the Dead,” the game’s boss fight track for Zagreus versus Hades, is one such example where the act of repetition (ludically and narratively) establishes this fight as ritualistic, changing the dynamics of their bond through the music and through the act of dying. Other investigations made through Mantilla-Wright’s case studies conclude that “In the Blood” not only lyrically speaks of Zagreus’ ludic progression through the game, but of the overall nature of social bonds, death, and acceptance, as sung by Orpheus and Eurydice.

“In the Blood” is one of a small handful of tracks in Hades that use vocals, but vocality broadly understood features heavily in Hades: every line of dialogue in Hades is fully voice-acted, resulting in over 21,000 lines of dialogue. Authors in this issue conceive of voice differently and to different ends: Shahmehri focuses on the way Eurydice’s singing voice acts in (and on) the game. He suggests that Eurydice’s song diverges from the soundtrack’s instrumental nature and prevailing processes up to that point, granting her agency over the game’s text. Hades’s positioning of Eurydice as a figure of authorial agency is therefore inseparable from its presentation of her voice. Pozderac-Chenevey explores the impact that the characters’ speaking voices have on their audience, focusing in particular on characters whose performances have been perceived as attractive. Specific vocal performances, she suggests, have helped players to discover, accept, and embrace their both-and sexual identities outside of normative heterosexuality, and have allowed online communities to form around the game and its characters. In this way, the voices of Hades help give voice to the often marginalized.

While this type of engagement with modern audiences personalizes the experience for players, Hades also engages deeply with ancient Greek mythology beyond its aesthetics in a way that develops some of its core themes and literary tropes. Mantilla-Wright discusses how the soundtrack manifests this, showing music to reflect and demonstrate the differing natures of godhood, as well as signifying the process of apotheosis. Hades also portrays some of the character dynamics and narratives that are especially important in ancient Greek literature, such as the bonds that tie together families, and struggles for power extending to regicide and patricide. Shahmehri investigates Hades’s interaction with the Orpheus and Eurydice myth as told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. He argues that musical processes in the game encourage players to stop and listen, affecting them in ways that parallel the profound effects ascribed to Orpheus’s voice in Ovid’s text.

Hades’s foundation in myth places it in dialogue with a variety of other media forms that engage with the same stories. Several of these articles broach issues of intertextuality in Hades. Shahmehri compares Hades’s depiction of Orpheus and Eurydice to representations of the couple in classical opera, finding that it both echoes and reworks the gendered dynamics of their story. Carpenter explores how the music of Hades alludes to film to suggest how video game music transcends questions of genre. In both of these cases, Hades appears as a meeting point for disparate musical and cultural practices, and incorporates elements of different texts into its own.

As with all successful games, many fans have used Hades as a source of inspiration for their own works of art and as a focal point for smaller communities online, practices that articles in this issue examine. Carpenter references stylistically divergent fan covers of a single song, and suggests that these indicate how Hades’s music transcends genre through interpretations by fans. In a similar vein of reinterpretation, Shahmehri suggests that players have warmly received Eurydice because of her initial appearance as a memorable, disruptive force in the game and its soundtrack. Mantilla-Wright’s article draws on sociocultural approaches to death and grief to recontextualize narrative themes in the soundtrack, culminating in a holistic portrayal of death through the game’s music and the highlighting of the game’s wider narrative message. Finally, Pozderac-Chenevey examines the fan community around Hades in detail, specifically on the proliferation of humorous and often erotically charged memes about Hades and sexuality. She investigates characters’ voices and their sexual attractiveness to players through empirical research of fan community responses in artwork and social media commentary, framing her analysis through an autoethnographic queer lens.

No single theme predominates in these articles, which is itself a sign of the game’s rich polyvalence. At turns historical, analytical, and deeply personal, these articles instead present an overview of possible avenues to explore in Hades, together presenting a primer on the game and introducing new theoretical concepts in the process. These articles each went through an intensive double-blind peer-review process, and we are grateful to all of the authors for their effort in sharing and developing their thoughts on the game.

To preface these perspectives is an interview with the one person who appears in each of these studies: the game’s composer, Darren Korb. Korb (who also provided the voice for Zagreus and his talkative boxing-dummy, Skelly) discusses his choices regarding instrumentation, considerations for reactivity and repetition, his compositional processes, as well as placing the composition of Hades in the broader context of Supergiant’s games. This provides an inside perspective on how music helps turn the repeating gameplay loops of Hades into an unpredictable and exciting experience—a concern that animates many of the peer-reviewed articles, as well. Both Korb and several of our authors explore, for instance, how the instrumental palette connects to specific elements in the narrative, how musical choices contribute to player engagement, and the role of the voice not only within the music, but also within dialogue. We are incredibly grateful to Korb for taking the time to let his insight into his compositional process form part of this special issue. It is to his authorial voice we now turn.