“We gave Bastion everything we had, knowing full well it was likely to be the only game we could make together as a team,” Supergiant Games creative director Greg Kasavin tells me, reflecting on the game’s 10th anniversary. First launching in 2011, Bastion paved the way for a legendary legacy for the indie studio, putting its name on the map with an experience that explored narrative elements and player agency in a way few games had done before. A decade later, it remains a classic, and its influence can be seen in every game Supergiant has produced since.
“We were thrilled that it was well received,” Kasavin says. “It put us in a position to keep making games together… and indeed, all seven of us who worked on that game are still at Supergiant in our respective roles all these years later, so we proceeded to collaborate on Transistor, then Pyre, and most recently, Hades. Our team grew to 12 for Transistor and Pyre, then grew to about 20 on Hades. We're still relatively small and intend to stay that way, since it's key to how we do things.”
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The culture at Supergiant is built on the strong bonds made between core members during its earlier years, and it seems Kasavin is aware that smaller, collaborative efforts like this express a level of genuine creativity that larger projects can’t always achieve. “Darren Korb, our composer and audio director, never worked on a video game before Bastion,” Kasavin says. “He and Logan Cunningham are old friends with Amir Rao, our studio director and co-founder, who's at the center of our team. I met Amir and Gavin Simon [Supergiant's other co-founder] while at my first development job, at Electronic Arts in Los Angeles. So I've been working with these guys for close to 15 years now.”
Having initially launched in early access, Hades 1.0 launched for PC and Nintendo Switch last year, and Kasavin notes that this game wanted to deliberately harken back to the studio’s earlier titles, particularly Bastion. “Hades in many ways was a conscious decision to return to our Bastion roots,” he explains. “With Bastion, we wanted to make a game that anybody could pick up and start playing, and then hopefully they would discover what was interesting about it through the reactive narration and everything else. For me personally, Bastion was the first game I got to write and design levels for, and as a former game critic, it was quite cathartic for me that the game earned some flattering reviews and later some awards.”
Bastion’s impact on the indie space and video game storytelling as a whole can’t be understated as it allowed independent efforts to prosper alongside the likes of Braid, Limbo, and Super Meat Boy. This identity likely explains why, even ten years later, it remains so beloved. It’s a masterpiece, a debut effort from a studio that would shape the industry in many unexpected ways moving forward. Despite the legacy it crafted and all of the achievements Supergiant has made since, Kasavin isn’t sure any future project will live up to when players finally saw Bastion for the first time.
“The lessons we learned working on that game have always stuck with us,” Kasavin says. “Even though Hades has now eclipsed Bastion's success, I don't expect any experience I will ever have will compare with the feeling of seeing players delighted by Bastion at events like PAX, where we let people get their hands on it. All of our subsequent games have been quite different though I think their underlying values haven't changed much at all since that time. We're really grateful that Bastion is still remembered at all, let alone remembered fondly, and each game we've made since has been an attempt to live up to our work on it.”
Next: Greg Kasavin On The Success Of Hades, Diversity In The Pantheon, And Zagreus In Smash
