Greek Mythology, we love it. But how the hell does someone make a game out of it?

Game Development Writing and Content
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I really really really want to come up with a game idea based on greek mythology that actually stays true to the myths. The only problem is that myths are mostly complete, not open ended. So i figured a choose your own adventure type of story, basically an rpg. I definetly want competitive aspects. But all together, im just confused. I know a lot about greek mythology and maybe that’s the hindrance? I can move on past what I already know. Any tips woulld be amazing, as well as ideas.

Oddly though… Should i just make a romance game?? With Eros and Phsyce?? It’s been stuck in my head but aaaa, I cant choose.

PLS HELP

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Let us hunt the gods Asura and Kratos style I would love it

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Are there books, games, etc that retell or explore Greek myths that you’ve enjoyed? Perhaps you could look at how they handle the stories they’re drawing from and see what you would or wouldn’t do differently.

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I once saw a blog for WIP inspired by Eros and Psyche, but as usual it didn’t even make it to the demo version. So the topic is free.

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Honestly, I was just thinking about this and I thought of something about two weeks ago: the Trojan War. Most of what we know about the war are the cause and the final year. There are also some things here and there. Heck the Iliad only covers about three days (not even the end of the war). It was a ten year war, so there is a lot that can be filled in.

I might try to write this, but that is a place to start. Also, you could do things in other reaches of Greece while Heracles, Cadmus, or Perseus are about. There are other kingdoms/major cities.

Something the Trojan War shows is how there are a lot of demigods that are from gods other than Zeus. However, there are some which shouldn’t have kids, like Athena.

EDIT: You could also take some existing knowledge and add more myth to it. Like have the gods actually show up to Thermopylae or helping Alexander the Great. Or write a fictional retelling of Xenophon.

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OH!! TYSM!! do you know where i could find it?

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Hasn’t been updated since June last year :person_shrugging:

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Hades is a pretty recent - and well-regarded - example of this. It’s an action game, but a lot of its appeal comes from its narrative and deep dive into character interaction. (If you wanted to play it for the story alone, the game lets you make yourself invincible.)
It takes place after all the events of Greek mythology, and has its gods and mythological figures extend beyond the original stories. So a Greek myth story is absolutely possible to do.

Besides telling stories that go beyond the traditional myths, you could also do a retelling. Maybe see how a random guy (the player) could survive the myths. As I recall, most of the extras tend to die.
You could also do it from the perspective of a god, guiding their champion, and coming into conflict with the other gods and their champions.

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i love the these ideas! They seem so interesting, especially that last one.

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If you want to retell a specific episode from mythology as an interactive story, there’s probably no way to do that while remaining faithful to canon events unless there are multiple variants of the story itself (which certainly can happen). But I can envision a few possibilities.

  • Tell an original story based on mythological tropes and motifs, in which gods and heroes who make an appearance are depicted as they are in the myths, but the focus is on a character of your own creation. Maybe your character is a peasant boy who just learned he’s the son of Zeus and sets out to make a name for himself in the style of his half-brothers Perseus and Heracles.
  • Retell a myth, but from the perspective of a peripheral figure. Perhaps your character is a Greek soldier who falls in love with a Trojan woman. He’s witness to lots of exciting scenes from the Iliad, maybe he can spar with Ajax or have a drink with Achilles and Patroclus, but he can’t influence their fates or the outcome of the war, which serves mostly as the background against which plays out a story of patriotic duty and forbidden love.
  • Find a mythological figure who doesn’t actually figure in any myths. There are references to Aletheia, the goddess of truth (a daimon, really), but outside a couple of Aesop’s fables, there aren’t any stories about her. You could tell one.
  • Write a prequel or sequel. What happened to Pandora after she opened that infamous jar?

Here’s a list of published ChoiceScript games that draw primarily on Greek mythology. Some diverge from canon more than others, but they might be worth studying so you can see in practice what works for you and what doesn’t.

  • Champion of the Gods/Exile of the Gods
  • Fields of Asphodel
  • An Odyssey: Echoes of War
  • The Saga of Oedipus Rex

It would still be fine to write about Eros and Psyche if that WIP were still being worked on, or even if it had been finished and published. The myth is in the public domain.

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A lot of good ideas have already been tossed around, so here’s a decent concept:
you can pick one of the lesser known gods or demi-gods such as Attis or Moros and write a story around them pulling from mythos of the other gods to get an idea of interaction between all of them.
I think it would be interesting to explore some of the gods with very little on them so you can build them more uniquely while still staying in setting.
-Love, Hardlet

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I love Greek Mythology, but I don’t think they work for straightforward adaptations. If you want to do a retelling, then it really should be a retelling because there just isn’t enough information on specific events.

I myself want to write some Greek Mythology romance games, specifically for Aphrodite, Eros and Psyche, and Hades and Persephone. I do think coming up with the overall plot is the hardest part of romance games, because it can’t just be random flirting scenes.

I think of you want to do Eros and Phyche, I think that can be a fun game! It’s a great myth

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It’s a pretty big setting, you can do basically anything you want in it.

Hell, many greek myths are basically the equivalent of comic books or saturday cartoons.

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Now I’m not a professional writer or anything, so take this one with a grain of salt, but one possible angle is framing it as a story that was lost or erased from history for one reason or another. By doing so, it gives various options on how to handle the main character and gives room for the narrative to breath without being too constrained by pre-existing stories.

For example, what if the MC was one of Odysseus’ men in the Odyssey who supposedly died but somehow made it to safety and is now on the run from followers of Helios? Maybe they seek refuge among other followers.

Another example, what if the MC were some bastard demi-god who did many horrific deeds, so the gods had them struck from the books to make them look better?

Maybe MC was the sidekick to some other famous hero like Hercules (sorry, Heracles) and saved his life once or twice during his labors, but MC asked not to be included in retellings to improve his image because wingmen are like that.

Best to pick a period of time where details are just scarce enough where this kind of stuff could conceivably go under the radar.

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So the key thing to realize is that there is no such thing as canon when it comes to Greek mythology. In fact, the word canon was coined by the scholars and librarians of the Hellenistic period to refer to the “best” stories, judged by their particular artistic criteria. It did not mean a “definitive continuity” which is the way that fandom uses canon today.

The body of tales we call “Greek mythology” are just the versions of stories that have managed to survive to the present day. They survived because someone copied and re-copied them down into a manuscript which was preserved, or because we found papyri somewhere. What survives today is not the only version of the myths.

Someone mentioned Eros and Psyche above – the extant version of that story is the “Cupid and Psyche” in the Latin prose novel Metamorphoses written by Lucius Apuleius. We don’t have the older Greek story in full, but we know it exists because Apuleius was adapting an older Greek story from his novel AND Eros and Psyche are a theme in Greek pottery.

Every time a Greek or Roman author took up the task of composing a mythological story, they made their own version of it. To be sure, there was a lot of cross-referencing and allusion to prior versions (and the audience likely had the general body of myth in their mind as well).

Someone talked about comic books – that’s exactly right. How many different versions of Batman’s origin story have you seen? Greek myth is the same way: is Aphrodite the daughter of Dione and Zeus (as in Homer) or is she formed from the castrated offshoots of Ouranos (as in Hesiod)?

All this to say: you can write what you want, just be relatively consistent with the myths as we know them. But that just means “color within the lines” (so, you know, don’t make Ares the god of peace and love and flowers) – you can otherwise do as you wish and it’s still a Greek mythology story.

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You meant three weeks, right?

I was going to suggest a few things, but honestly everything I was going to say have been suggested already above. In the end, the only restraints are the ones you impose on yourself. I don’t think it would be difficult to make a greek mythology inspired IF. In fact one of my endless WIPs lets you play as Thanatos (who knows if I’ll ever finish it).

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Na Just romance will be boring, add some tragedy , betrayed, war , bloodshed etc , add kratos

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Or maybe do, because Aphrodite might have been first a goddess of war in Greece, so why can’t Ares weave some flowercrowns?

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…now I want to see Ares chilling at Woodstock.

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Now is the time to let my inner geek out. :joy:

So, I don’t have the sources now, but it’s pretty much accepted that the earliest deities to show up in human societies are connected to the land, fertility and agriculture. As societies become more complex, the gods may acquire or shift to more specialized roles. Quite a few gods of war were also gods of either fertility or agriculture. This might indicate a sudden militarization of said societies (for example, to defend the land from invading forces or struggling for resources during droughts).

The mental image is that of a farmer lifted from the wheat field to the battle field. These men would certainly bring with them the gods they were accustomed to, and not without reason. Being gods of the land, they would help protect it.

Ninurta was a Summerian god of war and agriculture, Inanna was a Mesopotamian goddess of war and fertility, Perun was the head of the Slavic pantheon and had many domains including war and fertility. Mars himself, the Roman counterpart of Ares, was worshipped as a god of war and agriculture, and despite not having any archeological evidence that Ares was worshiped as a god of agriculture, it is not hard to believe he might have been once before shifting roles. His possible lost role of a fertility god might also explain his lasting association with Aphrodite in the collective imagination of the Greek (even though the two of them were not married), since she’s also a goddess of fertility.

This is all to say that an idyllic pastoral image of Ares with a crown of flowers, chilling in the field under the shade of a tree, petting a fluffly sheep, surrounded by a rowdy army of children while he lets out a hearty belly laughter is not impossible or weird at all. After all, every soldier was first a father and a farmer in early human societies. The War Ares is the man who fights because he either has everything on the line or because he has nothing else to lose. Either a John McClane or John Wick.

In the story I was writting where you play as Thanatos, Ares was planned to make a brief appearance, and the way I planned to portray him was exactly that, a dying god, because he had forgotten his roots, focused so much on war that he forgot what he was fighting for. By the way, the premise was that all gods would die one by one (and that’s why they are not around anymore) and Thanatos would be the last one telling their stories.

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