KRATOS: I pledged an oath in blood, and now my home, all

that I loved, is gone.

Pain is all I have left.

[SHOUTING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ARIEL LAWRENCE: Kratos, before he became what he is today,

the God of War, he was a captain in a Spartan army, and

he kind of rose up through the ranks and became a general.

He was facing off against the barbarian army.

His army was outnumbered.

He calls up to Ares, and he says, destroy my enemies and

my life is yours.

And in that instant, Ares shows up.

And he has two harpies bring up the Blades of Chaos.

So the Blades of Chaos were forged in the pits of Tartarus

by the smith god Hephaestus.

They're bloodthirsty.

Like, these blades almost have a soul to them.

[GRUNTING]

TODD PAPAY: The original character was a Spartan with a

short sword.

BRUNO VALAZQUEZ: But we wanted to have something that was

unique, and something that was more spectacular.

TODD PAPAY: One of the biggest things that we've always tried

to do with the series is make the player feel empowered.

ERIK SAN JUAN: Charlie Wen, our original concept designer

for Kratos, had gone through many, many iterations.

He's doodling on this napkin.

After all these beautiful paintings, Charlie made so

many of them.

I mean, you guys can look at all the books and the history,

but it all starts from a napkin.

We wanted to kind of have some dynamic range with his weapon.

So he would throw his blades out, but we were wondering,

how's he going to get them back?

Influenced by a game called "Rygar" that we really liked

back then, and saw that his weapon was

attached to a chain.

And we said, well, let's just try to do that.

And then we did that times two, and it felt really good.

TODD PAPAY: He becomes a ballerina, ballerina

of death with them.

Everything that you're doing always wraps

around those blades.

ARIEL LAWRENCE: Those blades will stand the test of time,

in terms of a weapon.

KRATOS: There will be only chaos.

RICHARD FURRER: My name's Richard Furrer.

I have a love affair with steel.

I've made maybe 200 swords, and I'm happy

with three of them.

If you look at the whole pantheon of blacksmithing, the

real art of the tool maker is never as

exemplified as with a blade.

If you're off, if you built it wrong,

someone's life is at risk.

Before they could pull the useful iron from a rock, if

they wanted anything made out of iron, they would have had

to have used meteorite falls.

So they'd have the space rock, the Heaven metal that they

would forge into shape.

And Aristotle wrote about this.

The Spartan sword that we're making today is a

later period Spartan.

We're crafting a blade from raw material.

We're taking a bloom, and we're forging it out into a

functional weapon.

[CLANGING]

RICHARD FURRER: Then we take it to a blacksmith's forge.

With two bellows, just like the Greeks used.

We need to pull it together into a solid bar, and we do

that through repeated heating and forging, and some forge

welding, meaning we're joining the

individual pieces together.

[CLANGING]

RICHARD FURRER: From there, it gets refined by hammering.

So we force it into the shape we want it to be in.

We heat the blade up to roughly 1,450 degrees

Fahrenheit, and then we cool it.

We have very little time to cool.

A matter of seconds.

This tool of death is born in this quench.

Taking off the rough edges, giving it a keen edge, a

proper hilt.

And then, then it can go off into the world and do what it

was made to do.

Back in the day, it would have been to defend and further the

ideals of Sparta, and it had to do that very well.

[GRUNTING]

PETER THOMAS: My name is Peter Thomas.

I started with the Japanese Kyokushin karate, later on

drafted into Thai boxing and Western boxing, as well as Jun

Fan Gun Fu and Jeet Kune Do.

[GRUNTING]

This is what we would call a short sword in today's world.

And again, this is usually roughly about 19 inches in

length, but the blade is about 15 inches.

This was used for one major thing, and that was for close

quarter combat.

Pretty much to kill or to be killed with

this type of sword.

The Spartan warriors were so physically fit, and so intense

and so feared, that they weren't even allowed in the

first Olympic Games.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PETER THOMAS: The fighting posture and the stance of the

Spartan warrior was very similar to a Western boxer.

They also have horizontal strikes that come here to head

level, neck level.

And also horizontal strikes that come down to the body.

And they would have thrusts that go inward.

They also have thrusts that go to the well of the neck.

A lot of cuts would go low as well, down to the femoral

artery, and come upward, like an uppercut in boxing.

There's a famous quote by a Spartan poet and a warrior,

and it goes something like this.

"Do not be in love with life when you're a fighting man."

And that just goes to show what kind of lifestyle that

these men had.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ALARIC: I'm Alaric the Warrior.

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[MUSIC PLAYING]