Origins:

Stairway to Hades was a very early name-driven concept, being born out of a simple inversion of “Stairway to Heaven”. That alone began to suggest some mechanics and visuals, but we were further inspired by things like the sense of vertigo one gets staring up or down an old lighthouse, and creepypasta like SCP-087.





Story:

While not central to a specific Mythgard location or narrative, (other than demonic influence in Oberos and generally wanting cards with dark and mature themes) there was a snippet of descriptive color text written up to help get the creative juices flowing:





“This bottomless stairwell obviously descends far past the point where it could reasonably be contained in the building, and indeed defies the laws of structural engineering. People have attempted to explore it and been lost for days or years, returning with eerily changed personalities and memories. Occasionally, someone known to be dead will ascend the steps and return to the world as if nothing was wrong with them. Their friends and loved ones generally can't stand to be around these "returners", claiming that they're not "real" even though they look and sound like themselves.”





This is reflected in an old piece of slightly too dry and “on the nose” flavor text…





You CAN reach the bottom. Whoever comes back up won't be the same person, though.

She came back, yes... but that's not our daughter! Not anymore.





...but near as we can tell, by the time the card made it into game data it had already been revised into the second, more personal and flavorful line.





Initial Design:

Stairway to Hades was first implemented as:





6[R]R Mythic, Demon Enchantment

When an occupying non-Demon minion dies, return it to play with [Frenzy]. It is now a Demon.





It’s perhaps a testament to the raw strength of this card that other than some under the hood things about how resurrection and minion tags work, the only really noteworthy change has been that it benefitted from a small cost reduction pass that affected many of the more expensive enchantments at the time.





Art:

This commission went out to mainstay Max Kostin for his mastery over gothic textures and horror themes, and right up front he delivered a set of three excellent takes on the stairwell…

We love to see a variety of versions on the same subject like this because it lets us make meaningful choices before a crazy amount of time has been sunk in, sometimes mixing and matching different sketches to arrive at a result, but it’s also just fun to imagine the decision tree resulting in similar but different finished art; in this case all the sketches were well developed enough that’s it’s extremely easy to picture how each could have been the one, but version C won out due to the angled perspective making it feel even less sane and orderly. The human eye sort of naturally searches for satisfying, balanced shapes and symmetry, and what leaves us wanting can be like an easy little portal to madness!





Enchantments have very tricky canvas and framing requirements though, so future developments would have to be expanded; Wide enough for landscape card art and tall enough to support the portrait orientation of the lanes...





This is where things actually get a little strange though. While investigating the history of this card, Xeneth discovered some old text comments referencing a painting hanging on the wall of the stairwell. A painting that isn’t visually present in the finished artwork at all. Digging deeper into the files revealed that there was indeed a creepy portrait hanging right there on the concrete, just in a hidden layer of the painting...

Nothing to fear, the above is a simple animated .gif with the layer in question turning on and off, but it really DOES capture some of the vibe we felt trying and failing to remember why this painting was hidden.





It’s possible that this was just a random detail that Mr. Kostin was playing around with that wound up on the cutting room floor, but Hoon nor anyone else can really remember vetoing it and the trail’s long since gone cold on who turned that layer off or exactly why. Little things like this can make you wonder if you haven’t switched places with another self in a very similar timeline, one where another decision was made or a slightly different conversation took place; a memory you should have but simply... don’t.





Wrapping Up:

The process of making games is pretty difficult, but it isn’t usually spooky or scary unless the content of the game itself finds a way to permeate the lives of the devs working on it. That little mystery painting is a far cry from the lost sleep of artists making the gory fatalities in a modern Mortal Kombat game biologically accurate, or the auditory hallucinations of a sound engineer on Dead Space, but it never seems to take much to haunt people with big imaginations, does it?