On March 22, 2005 (a little over 20 years ago), the world of video games witnessed the birth of one of its modern stars: a bald man with his body painted white who was eager to take down all the gods of Olympus, one by one. This was the starting point of God of War, a game that pushed the PS2 to previously unimaginable limits, not only in terms of graphics but also creatively: David Jaffe, its director, was given absolute creative freedom to create Dark Odyssey (the original title) drawing inspiration from movies like Clash of the Titans and Gladiator, and games like Onimusha. In fact, this is a sort of Greek version of that title. For years, Kratos has been a key figure in PlayStation, but that doesn’t mean he has lived without problems.
Brother of Chaos
With the success of God of War, the sequels began to pile up: in five years, the initial trilogy was released, accompanied by a good handful of games for both mobile and PSP, such as Chains of Olympus, where our protagonist sought Helios, the God of the Sun, to defeat Morpheus, the God of Sleep. However, the first game that truly became important for its story was Ghost of Sparta, for PSP, in which Kratos investigated his origins and ended up discovering that Deimos, his brother, was still alive. In fact, together they defeat Thanatos, the God of Death, who had him captive. What is less known is that this plot was… a simple recycling.
To understand it, we first have to go back to 2007, when Sony released a mobile game of the time, in 2D and with pixelated graphics, titled God of War: Betrayal. The game itself was impressive for its time, although it now feels quite lacking, and it told the story of how Kratos was unjustly accused of the murder of Argos and pursued the true criminal, a masked figure who ultimately escaped. It was a success, which led the team to consider making sequels… with Kratos’s brother as the protagonist.
The idea was to create a grand story telling the tale of Deimos’s quest for revenge that would culminate in a final scene where Kratos would have to choose between having his family back or killing his brother and ending everything he was doing. Obviously, he would choose the latter, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a game, and he would be forced to kill his own brother while witnessing the death of his family in Hades. Harsh? Yes, of course. It’s God of War, what did you expect? However, we never got to see it come to fruition.
And it was that money problems and the business itself caused everything to fall apart, and the success of God of War: Betrayal paradoxically led the team to split up in search of more appealing job offers. In fact, its creator, Philip Cohen, has commented on more than one occasion that he would like to make a new God of War for current phones, perhaps continuing with the proposed story. Because yes, the “mysterious assassin” of Argos was supposed to be, indeed, Deimos.
God of War has not been seen on handhelds again and, aside from a terrible game for Facebook in 2018, A call from the wilds (which follows Atreus’s first solo adventure) has only focused on doing the main story well. But who knows? Is the story of the gods already written? Can’t Deimos pay a visit home after so many years?
