Amir Rao

Amir Rao is cofounder and studio director of Supergiant Games, the San Francisco-based independent game studio that created Hades and Hades II, Pyre, Transistor and Bastion.

Hades & the Mythology of Supergiant Games

Sustaining and staying independent in the game industry has never been easy for studios at any scale, but Supergiant Games has been able to make it work since 2009. Based in San Francisco, the independent studio created Hades and Hades II, Pyre, Transistor, and Bastion, each of which launched to critical acclaim and enough commercial success to fund the next title. The studio has no outside ownership and self-publishes all its projects. The original seven members of the team who worked on Supergiant's first game are all still together, and the studio has since grown to nearly 30 full-time members of staff. How much of this was intentional, and how much was the will of the gods?

In this talk, Supergiant Games co-founder and studio director Amir Rao will talk about how Supergiant selects, plans, creates, and iterates on their projects. He'll share lessons learned from working on games that garnered a significant audience relative to the studio's size, and elements of the studio's culture that have allowed it to sustain over time.