Transistor remains the Hades team's best game, even years later

“Hey Red. We’re not gonna get away with this, are we?”

As far as cold opens go, Transistor’s is among the coldest in video games. Years before Hades catapulted Supergiant Games into the pantheon of GOTY-nominated studios, Transistor was its big hit. The isometric action RPG, released in 2014 for PlayStation 4, hit all of the beats: cool story, cool world, cool art, cool music. But it was the cool talking sword — the titular Transistor, the one who says that line of dialogue above — that really gave Transistor its edge.

Talking swords are rare entities in games. Supergiant Games creative director Greg Kasavin told Polygon in an email interview that the idea for Transistor originated in 2011, while he and art director Jen Zee were driving back from that year’s E3 conference. (This was before the studio’s debut, the 2011 action RPG Bastion, had even come out.)

“We must have been talking about what other games/stories we would tell if we could, and I brought up the idea of a fantasy game in which a tavern bartender ends up with a cursed sword containing the soul of someone dear to her,” Kasavin said.

As Kasavin tells it, 1992’s Ultima 7: Forge of Virtue, an RPG in which you “craft a powerful sword and infuse it with the soul of a demon who can talk to you and do all sorts of nasty things,” was one inspiration for the talking sword idea. But he always assumed that even Ultima’s designers took at least some inspiration from Michael Moorcock’s Elric books, a totemic series whose main character famously wielded a sentient sword named Stormbringer.

“Some years later, as we were struggling to make Transistor take shape, that specific idea came back as a possible angle on Transistor's protagonist. We ended up using it as a core part of the game's science fiction world and story,” Kasavin said. “Ideas are weird that way. They can take winding paths, just like we can.”

Unlike its influences, Transistor’s talking sword isn’t a malevolent demon. It’s not wielded by a tavern bartender. Ultimately, Transistor is a love story, and it begins with the very first line.

The camera pans over a cyberpunk skyline with Art Nouveau vibes. A moody, prog-inspired guitar track (“Old Friends” by Darren Korb) plays in the background. A woman with fire-red hair is bent over a man, a blade as big as Cloud’s Buster Sword buried in his belly. That’s when you hear the game’s opening words, which build on Supergiant’s aesthetic choices to effectively establish an enigmatic, almost noir-ish tone right from the jump. (There’s a reason why this line made Polygon’s ranking of the 100 best gaming quotes of all time.)

The woman’s name is Red; she’s a singer who lost her voice. The man no longer has his life, but he does have his voice. After getting stabbed, his consciousness is absorbed into the Transistor, thus he serves as its voice and personality throughout the game. It is immediately clear these two people hold immense meaning to each other.

According to Kasavin, he and studio director Amir Rao reworked this intro, and the underlying narrative, multiple times before landing on something that worked.

“This line was from the second major revision of the game's intro scene, after having rebooted many aspects of the fiction already. Not only that, it was part of a significantly longer monologue that we cut down to just these two sentences,” Kasavin said. “Iterating with him, we found that the old adage ‘less is more’ was true. At long last, something stuck, and we stopped messing with the intro moments.”

Kasavin added the biggest lesson from his work on Transistor was to be more accepting of the iterative process that’s such a critical part of game design: “I now have a different view on what back then I considered 'throwaway work.' Such work still is part of the process leading to the eventual result. Even if it didn't end up in the game, it led to what did end up in the game.”

Despite her prominence as the game’s protagonist, Red doesn’t speak much: she doesn’t get her voice back until the very end of the game. Instead, it’s the Transistor, voiced by Supergiant mainstay Logan Cunningham, who carries Transistor’s themes and dialogue — a persistent companion not just of Red but of the player too.

Supergiant has always possessed a supernatural ability for crafting enduring characters with astonishing depth. No matter the size of a character’s role, or of what form they take — even a talking sword — they have a certain staying power. Case in point, one Transistor line that sticks with Kasavin, beyond its gut-punch of an opener, is a refrain that doesn’t even come from the game’s primary speaking role.

“The Camerata, the game's antagonist group, has a sort of slogan that goes, ‘When everything changes, nothing changes.’ They mention it a couple of times. This is tied to their ethos, the nature of their city of Cloudbank, and what they're trying to achieve. I wanted to write an antagonist group that started off with a compelling idea, but lost their way in how they went about achieving it,” Kasavin said. “Transistor is more than 10 years old now, but as the real world around me changes and I get older, I still think about this slogan of theirs.”