The Most Faithful Mythology Game
Supergiant Games' Hades (2020) is widely considered the most mythologically faithful video game ever made. While it takes creative liberties — especially with its protagonist Zagreus — the game demonstrates a deep love and understanding of the source material. This guide breaks down every major character's game portrayal versus their original myth.
Zagreus: The Obscure God Who Became a Star
In the game, Zagreus is the son of Hades and Persephone, desperate to escape the Underworld. In real mythology, Zagreus is an extremely obscure deity from Orphic tradition — a form of Dionysus who was dismembered by the Titans and reborn. The game takes this kernel and builds an entirely new story around it, which is exactly what the ancient Greeks did with their myths too.
The Olympians: Spot-On Characterization
Zeus — The game nails Zeus as jovial, overbearing, and subtly terrifying. His Lightning boons capture his raw power.
Athena — Calm, strategic, offering defensive boons. Perfect characterization of the wisdom goddess.
Ares — Bloodthirsty and enthusiastic about violence. The game captures how the other gods find him somewhat unsettling.
Aphrodite — Confident, sensual, wielding the power of desire as a weapon. Her Charm effects mirror her mythological ability to manipulate any being through love.
Dionysus — Party-loving, generous with wine, but with an edge of chaos. The game hints at the darker aspects of Dionysus without fully exploring them.
Artemis — Independent, focused, deadly accurate. Her Critical Hit boons reflect her never-miss archery from myth.
The Underworld Crew
Nyx — The game portrays her as a powerful, maternal figure. In mythology, even Zeus feared her. The game captures her ancient authority beautifully.
Thanatos — Death personified, stoic and dutiful. The game adds a romantic storyline with Zagreus that has no mythological basis but feels emotionally authentic.
Megaera — In myth, she's one of three Furies who punish the wicked. The game makes her a complex character with a past relationship with Zagreus. The other Furies (Tisiphone and Alecto) also appear.
Hypnos — Brilliantly portrayed as sleepy and unhelpful, which is entirely on-brand for the god of sleep.
What the Game Adds
Hades adds relationship dynamics that don't exist in the original myths, particularly the family drama between Hades, Persephone, and Zagreus. But this family-centered storytelling is deeply Greek in spirit — the myths are fundamentally about divine family dysfunction.
The game also popularized several lesser-known figures: Hecate (in Hades II), Charon, Hypnos, and the Furies are all getting more attention from mythology enthusiasts thanks to Supergiant's work.
Zagreus Has an Ancient Pedigree After All
Making Zagreus the son of Hades looks like a bold invention, but it has a real ancient precedent. A lexicon entry preserved in the Byzantine Etymologicum Gudianum reports that Aeschylus, in a lost play, called Zagreus the son of Hades, and in another fragment seems to identify Zagreus with Hades himself. An early epic fragment from the Alcmaeonis addresses "Mistress Earth, and Zagreus, highest of all the gods," which suggests a chthonic power long before the Orphic poets took him up. The better-known version, told at length by Nonnus in the Dionysiaca (books 5–6), makes Zagreus the horned child of Zeus and Persephone, given Zeus's thunderbolt as a baby and then torn apart by the Titans. In that tradition he is later reborn as Dionysus. The game takes the Aeschylean thread, Hades as father, and drops the dismemberment. Players who meet Dionysus in the game as a cheerful cousin are, in Orphic terms, meeting another version of Zagreus himself.
Melinoë, the heroine of the sequel, also comes from a single obscure text: the Orphic Hymn to Melinoë, which calls her a saffron-robed daughter of Persephone, fathered by Zeus in the guise of Plouton. She is a goddess of night-wandering ghosts. You can find more on her in our Melinoë guide and the Hades II mythology guide.
The Shades You Meet: Myth vs. Game
Achilles and Patroclus. In the game Achilles is Zagreus's weapons trainer, separated from Patroclus, who waits in Elysium. The ancient sources disagree about where Achilles ended up. In Odyssey 11 he is a gloomy shade in Hades' halls who would rather be a landless labourer among the living than king of the dead. Pindar (Olympian 2) places him on the Isles of the Blessed, and later writers send him to the White Island (Leuke) in the Black Sea. Odyssey 24 says the two friends' ashes were mixed in a single golden urn, so the game's reunion has real roots. In myth, the trainer of heroes was the centaur Chiron, who taught Achilles himself.
Sisyphus. His boulder comes straight from Odyssey 11, where Odysseus watches him push a stone uphill that always rolls back. The game makes him a friendly, philosophical figure, which owes more to Camus than to Homer. The ancient Sisyphus was famous for cheating death itself, by chaining Thanatos in one version and by tricking Persephone into letting him return to the upper world in another. See the myth of Sisyphus.
Orpheus and Eurydice. The game has Orpheus as Hades' court musician, unable to sing after failing to bring Eurydice back. The ancient versions differ on the ending. In Virgil's Georgics 4 and Ovid's Metamorphoses 10, he loses her by looking back. Plato's Symposium claims the gods showed him only a phantom of her, because he was too cowardly to die for love. More at Orpheus and Eurydice.
Theseus and Asterius. Pairing Theseus with "Asterius the Bull of Minos" is a clever touch. Pausanias and Apollodorus both record that the Minotaur's proper name was Asterion or Asterius, named after Minos's stepfather, the Cretan king Asterion. The game's idea that the two became friends is pure invention, but the name is authentic.
Dusa. The cheerful floating Gorgon head is an original character. She nods to the fact that Medusa's severed head stayed potent after death. Perseus gave it to Athena for her aegis.
Places and Powers Worth Knowing
The game's Underworld regions loosely follow ancient geography. Tartarus is Hesiod's bronze-walled pit, as far below the earth as the sky is above it (Theogony 720–725). Asphodel comes from Homer's "asphodel meadow." Elysium, in Odyssey 4, is a land at the world's edge where Rhadamanthys rules and there is no snow or storm. Later writers moved it underground. The burning rivers of Asphodel suggest Pyriphlegethon, the fiery river named in Odyssey 10. The rivers Styx, Lethe and Acheron are all ancient. Chaos, who grants boons from a void in the game, is the first thing to come into being in Hesiod (Theogony 116), and Hesiod says Night was born from Chaos. That makes the game's choice of Nyx as Chaos's child accurate.
Some game mechanics also reflect myth. Hermes speeds you up because he is the messenger and the guide of souls (psychopompos). Poseidon's boons knock enemies back like waves. Demeter's frost recalls the winter she inflicts while grieving for Persephone. Persephone's return to the surface in the game reverses the ancient pattern: in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, she must go back down for part of every year because she ate pomegranate seeds.
Ancient sources
- Homer, Odyssey 11 and 24 — Odysseus's visit to the dead (Achilles, Sisyphus, Tantalus) and the shared urn of Achilles and Patroclus.
- Homer, Iliad 14 — Hypnos recalls how Zeus held back his anger out of fear of offending swift Night (Nyx).
- Hesiod, Theogony — Chaos, Nyx and her children Hypnos and Thanatos, the description of Tartarus, and Cerberus.
- Homeric Hymn to Demeter — the abduction of Persephone, Demeter's grief and the pomegranate seeds.
- Nonnus, Dionysiaca 5–6 — the fullest surviving account of Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone, killed by the Titans.
- Orphic Hymn to Melinoë — the only substantial ancient text about the goddess of ghosts who leads Hades II.
Frequently asked questions
Was Zagreus really the son of Hades?
In at least one ancient source, yes. Aeschylus is reported to have called Zagreus the son of Hades. The more common Orphic tradition makes him the son of Zeus and Persephone, a first incarnation of Dionysus.
Did Hades and Persephone have children in Greek mythology?
The major sources rarely give them any. Some Orphic texts link them to Zagreus, Melinoë or Makaria, but these traditions are late and scattered. Hesiod and Homer name no children of the couple.
Are Thanatos and Zagreus a couple in mythology?
No. That relationship is entirely the game's invention. In Hesiod, Thanatos is the iron-hearted son of Nyx and the twin of Hypnos, with no romantic myths of note.
Is Hades a good way to learn Greek mythology?
It is a good starting point, because its characterisations and many small details are well researched. But it changes family trees and relationships freely, so check anything important against the ancient texts or a beginner's guide.