Anniversaries create expectations, and few series had trained its fans to expect something big quite like this one. On 14 March 2025, eight days before God of War turned twenty, Santa Monica Studio set out its birthday plans on the PlayStation Blog — and the plans were generous, colourful and unmistakably aimed at the newest game rather than the oldest ones. There would be a free set of black-and-gold God of War Ragnarök skins, an art exhibition in Los Angeles, books, prints, vinyl, T-shirts and a World Serpent plush long enough to drape across a sofa. What there would not be, despite months of rumour, was a way to play Kratos’ Greek adventures natively on a PlayStation 5. This is a look back at that March 2025 celebration: a genuinely affectionate party, held in the shadow of the one present almost everybody had come hoping to unwrap.
Twenty Years of Rage, From Athens to the Nine Realms
The date at the heart of it all was 22 March. On that day in 2005, the first God of War arrived on PlayStation 2 in North America, introducing a furious Spartan named Kratos, a pair of chained blades, and a quest for revenge against Ares, the god who had tricked him into murdering his own family. Directed by David Jaffe at Santa Monica Studio, it mixed combo-driven combat, enormous boss encounters, puzzles and a retelling of Greek myth with a surprisingly bleak story underneath the spectacle. It sold in the millions, won end-of-year awards, and turned a studio better known for other work into one of PlayStation’s flagship teams almost overnight.
A PlayStation 2 with its DualShock 2 controller and memory card — the machine on which Kratos made his debut on 22 March 2005. Photo: Evan-Amos, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Greek era that followed was prolific. God of War II pushed the PS2 about as far as it would go in 2007, God of War III brought the feud with Olympus to the PlayStation 3 in 2010, and prequel God of War: Ascension closed that chapter in 2013. Ready at Dawn filled in the gaps on PSP with Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta, two portable entries far better than the phrase “handheld spin-off” usually suggests. Then, after a pause, the series reinvented itself. The 2018 God of War traded Greece for Norse myth, a fixed camera for an over-the-shoulder one, and a Kratos defined by rage for an older Kratos defined, however reluctantly, by fatherhood. God of War Ragnarök followed in 2022, and its free Valhalla epilogue arrived in December 2023. Count the mobile title Betrayal and the series stood at nine games — the number the anniversary T-shirt collection would use — across two pantheons and four generations of PlayStation hardware.
Writing on the PlayStation Blog, Santa Monica Studio’s lead community manager Grace Orlady struck a note of genuine disbelief at the milestone, reflecting that nobody at the studio in 2005 had anticipated the success the series would go on to have, and crediting the players who picked the games up and stayed on the journey. The celebration she laid out was built to run for more than a week, with something landing almost every day between 14 and 22 March.
Black and Gold: The Dark Odyssey Collection in Full
The headline gift was for owners of the most recent game. On Thursday 20 March, God of War Ragnarök received a free update on PlayStation and PC adding the Dark Odyssey Collection, a full cosmetic wardrobe in black and gold. The theme carried two layers of history. “Dark Odyssey” had been the working title of the original 2005 game during development, and the look itself revived an appearance from God of War II, where a black-and-gold Kratos was the reward for finishing that game on its hardest setting, God Mode. In 2007 you had to earn it the hard way. In 2025 Santa Monica simply handed it over, presumably reasoning that twenty years of loyalty was qualification enough.
Once the update was installed, the pieces waited in any Lost Items chest in the main game, or arrived automatically in Valhalla. The collection itself covered:
- For Kratos: a Dark Odyssey character appearance, plus a matching armour set made up of a breastplate, bracers and belt.
- For his companions: a Dark Odyssey Vestment for Atreus and a Dark Odyssey Witch Frock for Freya.
- For his weapons: new appearances and attachments for all three arms — the Leviathan Axe and its knob, the Blades of Chaos and their handles, and the Draupnir Spear and its hind.
- For his shields: appearances for the Guardian, Dauntless, Stone Wall, Shatter Star, Onslaught and Spartan Aspis shields, along with a Dark Odyssey rönd.
One caveat came attached: the weapon appearances were designed for the fully upgraded version of each weapon, so a half-finished axe could not wear the new look until it had been levelled all the way. Alongside the cosmetics, the same patch quietly delivered the update’s most durable improvement — an Edit Appearance option for weapon attachments and shield rönds. From then on, players could separate how a piece of gear performed from how it looked, choosing the statistics their build needed and the visual they actually liked. It was a small quality-of-life change, easy to overlook next to the birthday bunting, but it is the part of the update that kept paying off on every subsequent playthrough.
A PlayStation 5 with its DualSense controller — Ragnarök, the game the Dark Odyssey Collection was made for, is a PS4 and PS5 title that also reached PC in 2024. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
A Serpent You Can Fit in a Room — Just About
If the skins were the practical gift, the plush was the one people talked about. Made with Fangamer, with pre-orders opening on Wednesday 19 March, the Jörmungandr plush measured 67 inches from nose to tail — five feet seven inches of World Serpent, the vast creature who encircles Midgard in Norse myth and who, in God of War (2018) and Ragnarök, looms out of the Lake of Nine as one of the series’ most beloved presences. The games’ serpent speaks an ancient tongue, helps more than he hinders, and is very difficult to pet. The plush solved at least that last problem.
Thor and the Midgard Serpent, Emil Doepler’s c.1905 illustration of the World Serpent of Norse myth — the creature the games reimagined as Jörmungandr, and the anniversary turned into a 67-inch plush. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. This is the mythological artwork, not the plush itself.
It was engineered for play, not just display. A hidden sleeve behind the head turned the plush into a puppet, so owners could re-enact the serpent’s first meeting with Kratos and Atreus at the lake. Its tongue was magnetised, and a miniature Leviathan Axe could be stored inside its mouth or taken out and, as the announcement put it in spirit, handed to somebody deemed worthy of wielding it. As a piece of anniversary merchandising it was hard to fault: funny, specific to this series rather than generic, and sized with a commitment that bordered on a storage problem. Few birthday presents announce themselves quite like a serpent that needs its own seating plan.
Thor fishing for the Midgard Serpent, from an 18th-century Icelandic manuscript — an older telling of the serpent’s most famous encounter. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Art on Walls, Books on Shelves, Nine Games on Vinyl and Cotton
The rest of the week filled in around those two centrepieces. From Saturday 15 to Sunday 23 March, Gallery Nucleus in Los Angeles hosted the 20th Anniversary Exhibition, built around new artwork inspired by the series from current and former Santa Monica Studio developers — one featured piece, by associate art director Dela Longfish, was previewed in the announcement — alongside concept art from across the games and memorabilia from the studio. Panels at the gallery brought together cast members from the Greek and Norse eras, a collision of pantheons the studio promoted with obvious delight. For fans who could not get to California, a free fan kit landed on 14 March with banners, icons and desktop and mobile wallpapers in the anniversary’s black-and-gold livery; on 20 March, anniversary items reached the Steam Points Shop for PC players, and a free anniversary avatar appeared for PlayStation Network users.
The physical releases rolled out day by day. Pre-orders opened on Monday 17 March for the God of War: 20th Anniversary Retrospective, a two-volume book set tracing the series’ development through interviews with the people who made it, plus their stories, insights and art. Cook and Becker’s anniversary print collection followed on Tuesday 18 March, opening with artist Ollie Hoff’s takes on the 2005 original and the 2018 reboot, with a 20 percent discount running on selected items from their range through the month and more pieces promised later in the year. Thursday 20 March belonged to Laced Records: a limited-edition vinyl box set of thirteen discs spanning from the 2005 game to Valhalla in 2023, and — a detail Greek-era fans could savour — the first-ever vinyl releases for that saga’s music, as double LP editions for each of the first three games. Insert Coin closed the week on Friday 21 March with a T-shirt collection giving all nine games the same treatment: each logo in a metallic gold finish on black cloth.
There were sales, too, of a sort that quietly underlined the state of the catalogue. PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium members could already find Ragnarök and the 2018 game in the Game Catalog, while Premium members also had God of War III Remastered in the Classics Catalog. On PC, the two Norse games were discounted on Steam and the Epic Games Store until 20 March. In other words, if the anniversary made you want to replay the series, PlayStation could sell or stream you the Norse half of it immediately. The Greek half was another matter.
The Remaster That Wasn’t There
None of this happened in a vacuum, because for months the anniversary had come with a rumour attached. Reports circulating from October 2024 onwards claimed that a remastered collection of the Greek-era games was in the works — versions of the first three mainline titles plus Chains of Olympus, Ghost of Sparta and Ascension, supposedly being prepared with remaster specialists Nixxes involved, and supposedly to be announced in March 2025, the anniversary month. The claims were repeated widely, and in February 2025 they gained fresh fuel when journalist Jeff Grubb suggested that whatever was coming would arrive closer to the anniversary itself. It is important to record what those stories always were: unconfirmed, sourced to insiders of varying reliability, and never endorsed by Sony. Even sympathetic coverage at the time noted the rumblings had never been properly substantiated.
A PlayStation 3 with its controller — the last PlayStation console on which the whole Greek saga could be played from discs, thanks to its era’s remaster collections. Photo: Evan-Amos, via Wikimedia Commons.
Santa Monica, to its credit, tried to lower the temperature before it boiled over. On 7 March, announcing the anniversary panel, the studio added a plainly worded clarification: with all the anticipation around the event, it wanted to be clear that there were no planned announcements for it. The 14 March PlayStation Blog post then showed what the celebration actually consisted of, and a remaster collection was not in it. The disappointment that followed was real, but it deserves an honest label. Fans had not been promised a collection and then denied one; they had been sold a possibility by the rumour mill, and the official plans — skins, art, books, a very long snake — were never going to compete with the imaginary box set people had already designed in their heads, complete with a dream feature list.
And yet the underlying wish was, and remains, entirely reasonable. Sony had remastered this series enthusiastically once before: the first two games reached PS3 in a collection, the PSP pair followed in another, and God of War III made it to PlayStation 4 in remastered form in 2015. Those PS3 collections are now well over a decade old themselves. On a PS5, God of War III Remastered plays natively and the Norse games are readily available, but the original two games, the PSP entries and Ascension have no native modern release — on current hardware they are reached, where they are offered at all, through PlayStation Plus Premium cloud streaming, with all the latency, availability and preservation caveats streaming brings. The founding chapters of one of PlayStation’s defining series deserved better than a buffer icon on their twentieth birthday, and everybody in the March 2025 conversation, on both sides of it, knew that was the real grievance underneath the jokes about plush serpents.
A Good Party, Measured Against an Imaginary One
Judged on its own terms, the celebration was a good one. The Dark Odyssey Collection cost nothing, reached every Ragnarök owner on console and PC, and tied its design to two genuine pieces of series history rather than a generic birthday logo. The Edit Appearance addition improved the game permanently. The exhibition gave the series’ artists, past and present, a gallery wall instead of a social media thread. The retrospective books and the Greek soundtracks on vinyl treated the old games as history worth documenting and hearing properly — even if not, this time, as games worth reissuing. And the Jörmungandr plush remains the rare piece of licensed merchandise that could only have come from this series.
Judged against the rumour, of course, it fell short, because almost any real announcement would have. That tension is the honest summary of God of War at twenty in March 2025: a series in rude health, celebrated warmly and at length by the studio that made it, whose earliest adventures were nonetheless harder to play on the anniversary than they had been fifteen years earlier. The skins were sick, as the original headline for this story cheerfully put it. The serpent was enormous. The Greek saga, for the moment, stayed where the rumours had found it — beloved, discussed, and still waiting for somebody at PlayStation to make it official.