Supergiant Games made its first game in a house in San Jose, California. Its co-founders, Amir Rao and Gavin Simon, lived in Rao’s father’s house while they worked. Their audio director, Darren Korb, was in New York, and so was the game’s only voice actor, Logan Cunningham, who recorded more than 3,000 lines of dialogue in what Edge called “Korb’s Brooklyn closet-cum-sound room”. The result, Bastion (2011), had sold more than half a million copies and won more than 100 awards within a year. Since then the studio has made four more games, moving from tactics to sport to roguelike, without ever being owned by anyone else.
Fast facts
- Founded: 2009, by Amir Rao and Gavin Simon, formerly of Electronic Arts.
- Base: San Francisco.
- Size: seven people when Bastion shipped in 2011; fewer than 20 in 2018.
- Key people: Greg Kasavin (creative director and writer), Jen Zee (art director), Darren Korb (audio director and composer), Logan Cunningham (voice).
- Games: Bastion (2011), Transistor (2014), Pyre (2017), Hades (2020), Hades II (2025).
- Funding: its own. “We’re not owned by anyone, and we’re self-funded,” Kasavin said in 2012.
From Command & Conquer to a house in San Jose
Rao, Simon and Greg Kasavin met at EA, working on its Command & Conquer games. Kasavin later said that EA had taught them “a lot of good production discipline”: “I think a lot of independent developers have trouble finishing their games, right? But we’d gone through the process several times.” Rao was the one who brought people together. He, Korb and Cunningham had known each other since childhood, and he and Kasavin had shared a flat in Los Angeles. “Amir is our Commander Shepard,” Kasavin told Edge. “He goes around and picks people up.”
They started by listing what they could do that larger studios could not. “One of those advantages was, ‘Hey, our audio director, who is a very talented musician, is roommates with a guy who has an amazing voice and is an amazing actor,’” Kasavin said. “So, first of all, why don’t we do something with voice?” A big studio would need to book a recording session. Supergiant could record whenever it liked. The team did without design documents: the writing, the levels, the art and the music were all made side by side and put straight into the game to see what worked.
Bastion
Bastion came out on Xbox Live Arcade in 2011, published by Warner Bros, and later for PC, Mac, the Chrome browser and the iPad. It is an action role-playing game seen from above, set in a shattered world whose ground flies back into place beneath the Kid’s feet as he walks. What made people talk about it was the narrator, Rucks, voiced by Cunningham, who comments on what the player is doing as they do it.
The idea arrived during a prototyping stage that lasted about nine months. “The narration was something that Amir just tried one day,” Kasavin told Edge. The game had a text-based dialogue system that “was kind of slowing down the pace”. Rao had Cunningham record a few lines and put them in. “As soon as the voiceover went in, it was pretty dramatic.” Making it work took a great many triggers, written by hand, because “no lines should repeat on a single playthrough”. Among the games Rao looked at was NBA Jam and its announcer.
Edge gave Bastion nine out of ten. Its reviewer found that the narrator “never repeats himself, and yet he never lapses into prosaic football chatter”, and that the voice bound the player to the action, “weaving a conspiratorial spell that creates an unexpected intimacy”. Its world looked, the magazine said, like “a trip through a garden centre managed by Tom Waits and Alphonse Mucha”. By May 2012 it had sold more than 500,000 copies and won Best Debut and Best Downloadable Game at the Game Developers Choice Awards. A year later Edge put its sales at 1.7 million.
Transistor and Pyre
The studio could have made another Bastion. “At the end of Bastion, we sat down and discussed our preoccupations as individuals,” Kasavin said. “We put it all down on a board and talked about it, fought about it, and eventually it starts to turn into something.” The result was Transistor (20 May 2014, for PC and PlayStation 4), a science-fiction game drawn in an art nouveau style that Jen Zee based as much on Gustav Klimt and Mucha as on the comics artist Moebius. Its heroine, Red, is a singer whose voice has been stolen. She carries a sword that talks, voiced by Cunningham. Combat let the player freeze time, plan a sequence of moves and then watch Red carry them out. Kasavin described it as a way of combining older turn-based tactics games with “the immediate feel of action games”. The game was self-funded, “just like Bastion was”. Korb wrote and produced its soundtrack, and Ashley Barrett, who had sung on Bastion’s, sang its five songs.
Pyre (July 2017, for PC and PlayStation 4) mixed a story told in the manner of a visual novel with a sport. The player guides a band of exiles across the Downside, where the Commonwealth has banished them, and wins their freedom one at a time in Rites: contests of three against three, in which each side tries to get a glowing orb into the other’s pyre. Writing in Wireframe in 2020, the narrative designer Antony de Fault called Pyre “the studio’s first attempt to solve the problem of death”: because a lost Rite did not end the game, “failure was no longer an end state”. Hades, he wrote, “solves death by simply making dying over and over the point”.
Hades and after
Hades went further. Supergiant released it in early access in December 2018 with a team of fewer than 20 and developed it in public for nearly two years before version 1.0 in September 2020. It sold more than a million copies within days of its full release and won the BAFTA for Best Game; the Hades entry has the full story. Hades II, its sequel, followed the same route, entering early access in May 2024 and reaching version 1.0 on 25 September 2025.
In its own words, Supergiant is still “a small independent studio in San Francisco”. “All seven of our original staff are still working together here in their respective roles,” it wrote, “now bolstered by more than twice as many talented individuals who complete our team.”
Sources
- Edge issue 231, September 2011, pp. 102–104: Bastion review (Xbox 360, publisher Warner Bros, nine out of ten) and interview with Greg Kasavin and Amir Rao on the narrator, the nine-month prototype, the triggers and NBA Jam.
- Edge issue 240, May 2012, pp. 140–143, “Studio Profile: Supergiant Games”: founded 2009, eight staff; Rao and Simon as cofounders; meeting at EA on the Command & Conquer games; Rao’s father’s house in San Jose; Cunningham’s 3,000-plus lines in Korb’s Brooklyn closet; the childhood friendships; sales over 500,000, over 100 awards, the 2012 Game Developers Choice Awards; no design documents; “not owned by anyone”; the move to a San Francisco studio.
- Edge issue 254, June 2013, pp. 58–61: Transistor preview; Bastion’s 1.7 million sales; seven staff when Bastion shipped and ten in 2013; Jen Zee, Klimt, Mucha and Moebius; Red and the sword; the combat; self-funding; Bastion on PC, Mac, Chrome and iPad.
- Wireframe issue 44, October 2020, pp. 54–55: Antony de Fault, “Narrative Showdown: Hades vs Pyre” (the exiles, the Downside and the Commonwealth, the Rites and liberation, failure in Pyre and Hades).
- Supergiant Games, Transistor: Original Soundtrack on Bandcamp (web): “Written, produced and recorded by Darren Korb”, vocals by Ashley Barrett, released 20 May 2014. https://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/album/transistor-original-soundtrack
- Wikipedia, “Transistor (video game)” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): released in May 2014 for Windows and PlayStation 4; Ashley Barrett as the female vocalist on Bastion’s soundtrack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_(video_game)
- Wikipedia, “Pyre (video game)” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): released in July 2017 for Windows, Linux and PlayStation 4, citing Greg Kasavin, “Pyre Launches July 25 on PS4”, PlayStation Blog, 30 May 2017; the Rites as three-against-three contests to put out the opposing pyre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyre_(video_game)
- Supergiant Games, “Hades FAQ” (web): “a small independent studio in San Francisco, founded in 2009”; the seven original staff. https://supergiantgames.com/blog/hades-faq
- For Hades and Hades II, see the sources in the Hades entry.