Greek Mythology in Modern Media: Games, Shows, Books, and Beyond

Supergiant Games made the defining roguelike of a generation and then wrapped it in a family drama that happens to involve the Lord of the Dead. You play as Zagreus, son of Hades, trying to get out of the Underworld one failed run at a time, and the failing is the point.

When you die you end up back in the House of Hades, where conversations with Achilles, Nyx, Megaera, and your own father push the story forward, and it's genuinely literary in its emotional complexity.

It solves roguelike storytelling's oldest problem by turning death into progression. Every time you come back, you unlock new dialogue and new relationships, and characters you thought you had figured out keep opening up.

The Olympians work as power-ups and as people at the same time, carrying agendas, rivalries, and real affection for their wayward cousin. Aphrodite is warm and conspiratorial. Ares is disturbingly enthusiastic about violence. Dionysus talks like your most charismatic friend at a party.

Hades won virtually every major award across 2020 and 2021, including the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Video Game, the first video game ever to win a Hugo; it also swept the BAFTA Games Awards with five wins, claimed the DICE Award for Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction, and earned a rare 93 on Metacritic.

It sold over seven million copies, and it taught a whole generation of gamers the names Eurydice, Patroclus, and Thanatos.

Hades II arrived in 2024 and moved the spotlight to Melinoe, Zagreus's sister and a witch trained by the goddess Hecate. Where Zagreus fought his way up and out of the Underworld, Melinoe fights downward toward the imprisoned Titan Chronos.

She's disciplined and grief-stricken where her brother was rebellious and irreverent. The Early Access launch drew over 100,000 concurrent players on day one, and Supergiant used the sequel to widen the cast. Hecate arrives as mentor, Odysseus as a battle-scarred strategist, and Apollo finally makes his entrance.

Melinoe's magic-focused combat gives the sequel a rhythm of its own.

God of War asks what happens when a mortal decides the gods deserve to die. Santa Monica Studio's original came out on the PlayStation 2 on March 22, 2005, casting you as Kratos, a Spartan general whom Ares tricks into killing his own wife and daughter. Athena points him at Ares. Kratos kills him, takes the throne of the God of War for himself, and the grudge only grows from there.

Across God of War II and the PS3 capstone God of War III (2010), Kratos turns on Olympus itself, until Poseidon dies and the seas swallow the world, Hades falls, and Zeus takes a bare-knuckle beating that ends the pantheon. Where the rest of this list treats the gods with reverence or wit, God of War treats them as a demolition job, all blood, betrayal, and the crunch of divine bone.

Sony says the franchise has sold more than 51 million copies, with God of War III the best seller of the Greek run, so if you want the myth at the core, play the original trilogy, later bundled and remastered for newer consoles. The praised 2018 reboot and its sequel Ragnarok take Kratos into Norse territory and leave Olympus behind.

Ubisoft rebuilt ancient Greece as a place you can walk through, from the streets of Athens to the cliffs of Sparta to the volcanic shores of Lesbos, at a scale no game had attempted before. As either Alexios or Kassandra, a mercenary descended from Leonidas, you can spend upwards of a hundred hours sailing the Aegean, debating philosophers, fighting in the Peloponnesian War, and running into mythological creatures that blur the line between history and legend.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey contributed to Ubisoft's record revenue year and earned an 83 on Metacritic across platforms, and its Discovery Tour mode, released as a free update, stripped out combat entirely and turned the whole world into an interactive museum.

You can walk a recreated Parthenon, sit in on a lecture about Athenian democracy, or handle period-accurate pottery. Multiple universities, including ones with established classics departments, put it in their curricula.

The Fate of Atlantis DLC sends players into the mythological realms themselves (Elysium, the Underworld, and Atlantis) to deal with Persephone, Hades, and Poseidon in storylines that ask real questions about godhood and power.

Kassandra came out of all of it as the fan favorite, and Ubisoft went on to make her the canonical protagonist of the wider narrative.

Three years after Odyssey, Ubisoft went back to Greece and threw out the historical realism to make a comedy. Immortals Fenyx Rising is narrated by Prometheus and Zeus themselves, who bicker constantly over the details of the story you're playing.

That framing turns every quest, puzzle, and boss fight into an argument between a Titan who takes mortals seriously and a god who absolutely does not.

The design borrows openly from Breath of the Wild, filling the Golden Isle with physics puzzles, mythological vaults, and corrupted gods who need rescuing. Ares has been turned into a rooster. Aphrodite is a tree. Athena is a child. Each corruption reflects that god's mythological domain in clever ways, and restoring them means working through dungeons themed around their stories. The humor lands more often than not, because the writing clearly loves the source material even while poking fun at it. The Greeks put their own gods on the comic stage often enough themselves.

Commercially it met Ubisoft's internal sales expectations and earned an 80 on Metacritic, with critics praising its colorful art direction and puzzle design. It sold well at launch, and it went over especially well with families and younger players looking for a gentler way in. Ubisoft has cited it as one of the company's most well-received new IPs.

Three mythology-themed DLCs expanded the world further, adding Chinese mythology alongside additional Greek content.

Charlie Covell's Netflix series drops the Greek gods into a world that looks exactly like ours, modern cities and social media and celebrity culture included, and makes them every bit as petty and dysfunctional as the myths always suggested. Jeff Goldblum's Zeus is a vain, aging patriarch in a linen suit, coming apart over a single new wrinkle he's convinced is a prophecy of his downfall.

The show plays mythology as dark comedy and gets away with it because it takes the source material's emotional logic seriously even while transplanting it into absurdist modern settings. Dionysus runs a nightclub empire and is hollowed out by hedonism. Eurydice works in a corporate afterlife that processes the dead like a bureaucratic DMV.

Prometheus, played with quiet fury by Stephen Dillane, has been chained and tortured for so long that his resistance has calcified into something between rage and religion.

Kaos landed a 76% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with particular praise for Goldblum's scene-stealing performance and for Covell's willingness to be genuinely, unpredictably weird in the same way the myths are.

The Guardian gave the series five stars and called it "subtle and intricate, witty, rigorous, hugely intelligent, funny and brutal." Greek mythology was always a collision of comedy and horror, divine beauty and stomach-turning violence, and Kaos understood that better than adaptations with twice its budget. It got cancelled after one season anyway, which set off a loud fan campaign to save it.

Two widely panned films had already turned Rick Riordan's beloved novels into incoherent blockbusters, so Disney+ tried the radical option and let the author into the room. Riordan served as an active producer on the series, and the difference is immediately apparent.

Walker Scobell's Percy is twelve years old, actually twelve rather than Hollywood twelve, and the show trusts its young audience enough to let the story breathe at the pace of a novel instead of a trailer.

The first season adapts The Lightning Thief with a fidelity that borders on devotional. Scenes are expanded, character dynamics deepened, and the modern-world mythology benefits enormously from a television budget spent on worldbuilding instead of set-piece explosions.

Camp Half-Blood feels like a real place. The gods come across as distant, complicated parents whose divine responsibilities are barely distinguishable from neglect.

Riordan's books have sold over 70 million copies worldwide, making Percy Jackson one of the best-selling children's fantasy series in history, and the premiere drew 13.3 million viewers in its first six days on Disney+ and Hulu, the top Disney Branded Television premiere of all time at the time of release.

For that fanbase the series is vindication after years of adaptation disappointment, and for everybody else it's a well-crafted fantasy adventure that doubles as the most accessible introduction to the Greek pantheon currently available. The second season, adapting Sea of Monsters, keeps the momentum with expanded mythology and higher dramatic stakes.

Blood of Zeus comes from Powerhouse Animation, the studio behind Netflix's acclaimed Castlevania, and it's an original story set inside the framework of classical myth. It follows Heron, an illegitimate son of Zeus, pulled into a war between gods and giants that threatens Olympus and the mortal world alike, and it wears its anime influences openly in combat sequences with a visceral intensity most Western animation avoids.

Blood of Zeus debuted as one of Netflix's most-watched animated series of 2020, reaching the platform's Top 10 in dozens of countries during its first week, then got renewed twice more and ran through its conclusion in 2025.

What separates it from the spectacle is how dangerous the Olympians are allowed to be. Hera's rage plays as the cold fury of a queen betrayed one time too many, and Zeus's paternal concern for Heron is complicated by the small matter of his infidelity having created the crisis in the first place.

Plenty of adaptations sand the myths down for modern sensibilities. This one keeps the pantheon tearing itself apart, and keeps mortals in the blast radius.

Hollywood's 2004 Troy cut the gods out entirely, no Athena, no Apollo, so the BBC and Netflix co-production did the opposite. It tells the full story of the Trojan War with the gods restored, manipulating events, choosing sides, and appearing to mortals in forms both seductive and terrifying.

The series runs from Paris's judgment of the three goddesses through the fall of Troy itself across eight episodes, which leaves room for characters usually compressed into montage. Cassandra's curse gets real dramatic weight. Achilles and Patroclus's relationship is portrayed with understated intimacy.

Helen is granted agency and interiority instead of being reduced to a face and a casus belli, and David Gyasi's Achilles brought a physicality and emotional complexity that rewarded the show's slower, more character-driven approach.

It premiered to 3.2 million viewers on BBC One and sparked heated cultural conversation over its diverse casting choices and over its decision to include the gods as active characters rather than metaphors. It never got the commercial breakout some of the others did, but it stands as one of the most faithful screen treatments of the Iliad's emotional architecture, and it dramatizes what it felt like to live through a war run by beings who treated human suffering as entertainment.

Christopher Nolan spent $250 million and shot the entire thing on IMAX film cameras, a first for a feature, with Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope. It came out in July 2026 with the highest Rotten Tomatoes score of Nolan's career at release. Reviews frame it as a monumental, human-scaled retelling that stands on its own, with modernized language and the gods pushed into the background.

Madeline Miller took a figure who occupies barely a chapter of the Odyssey, the witch who turns men into pigs, and gave her an entire life. Circe spans millennia, from an awkward childhood among contemptuous Titans to exile on Aiaia, encounters with Daedalus, Hermes, Odysseus, and Penelope, and a final reckoning with what immortality actually costs. It's one of the most important works of mythological fiction published this century.

Miller's prose reads as ancient and immediate at once. Her Circe is a woman of the ancient world whose experiences of powerlessness, transformation, and self-discovery still land, because the dynamics of power haven't changed as much as we'd like to believe.

Circe spent over 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, sold over half a million copies in the US alone, and was optioned by Max for a limited series adaptation.

None of that explains why it matters. Miller understood that the myths were told by the victors, so the heroes get the epics while the women they encountered, transformed, abandoned, punished, and forgot get footnotes. Circe is one of those footnotes, expanded to a full novel, and it showed how much of mythology's richest material had been sitting in the margins.

It opened the door for a wave of feminist mythological retellings, Natalie Haynes's A Thousand Ships and Jennifer Saint's Ariadne among them.

Before Circe, Miller wrote the book that announced her as the foremost mythological novelist of her generation. The Song of Achilles retells the Iliad through the eyes of Patroclus, the companion whose death drives Achilles to his final, terrible rampage against Troy.

Miller's masterstroke is making the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus unambiguously romantic, a love story rendered with the same gravity and beauty as any in the Western canon.

The novel won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English-speaking world, and then more or less sat there, its initial reception warm but measured. BookTok changed that. In the early 2020s, reader-made videos tagged #SongOfAchilles amassed hundreds of millions of views across the platform.

Sales surged nearly a decade after publication, a trajectory virtually unheard of for literary fiction, and the book has since sold millions of copies worldwide and stayed a fixture on bestseller lists more than twelve years after release.

Miller's real achievement is making you feel the weight of a story whose ending everyone already knows. Patroclus will die. Achilles will follow. Troy will fall. Knowing all of that ahead of time doesn't dull a thing, because Miller writes the small moments, Achilles learning the lyre, the two boys swimming, a fig shared in silence, with such tenderness that the war, when it comes, feels like the desecration it always was.

Rachel Smythe's webtoon-turned-graphic-novel series reimagines the myth of Hades and Persephone as a contemporary romance set in a neon-drenched modern Olympus. Persephone is a pink-skinned college student navigating divine society. Hades is a blue-skinned CEO of the Underworld Corporation, brooding and awkward in equal measure.

The aesthetic is bold, all saturated colors and fashion-forward character designs, with a visual language drawn equally from manga, Art Deco, and Instagram.

Lore Olympus became the most-read series in Webtoon history with over 1.7 billion reads on the platform, the print editions debuted as a number-one New York Times bestseller, and it won the Eisner Award for Best Webcomic in 2022, 2023, and 2024, the first series ever to take comics' highest honor in that category three consecutive years, before completing its run in 2024 after three seasons.

For millions of readers, Persephone is pink. Hades is blue. Olympus has skyscrapers.

Beneath the romance and the visual spectacle, Smythe wove in trauma, consent, power imbalance, and recovery, giving the series an emotional gravity its candy-colored palette never advertises. The myth of Persephone has always been a story about autonomy and agency, so Smythe built a multi-year narrative around what it means to choose your own life while gods and Titans keep making the choices for you.

Anais Mitchell spent over a decade building Hadestown, starting as a concept album in 2010, then working through developmental theater productions before it opened on Broadway in 2019 and promptly won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical. The show retells the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice as a New Orleans jazz-inflected folk opera set in a Depression-era underworld, where Hades runs a mining company, Persephone is a speakeasy queen who migrates between worlds with the seasons, and Hermes narrates with the weary charisma of a man who has watched this story end badly every time.

Its central innovation is making the audience complicit in the tragedy. Hermes tells you from the beginning that it's a sad song and that it ends badly, and you watch anyway, because Orpheus's faith that his song can change the world is so desperately beautiful that you want to believe it too. When he turns around, and he always turns around, the devastation lands because you chose to hope alongside him.

Hadestown has grossed hundreds of millions at the Broadway box office, spawned touring productions across North America and in London's West End, and its cast recording has accumulated hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify.

That's Greek mythology filling a theater eight shows a week, year after year, without a single CGI creature or franchise IP attached to it.