This post was originally published on Audible.com.
The scale and detail of the story’s world-building is among the greatest aspects of The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. The books’ titular Games have their own fascinating history, amounting to so much backstory and lore that Collins continued to explore the setting of the original trilogy with two prequels, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Sunrise on the Reaping.
The drama of the Games made The Hunger Games series a global sensation. The Games display the brutality of the Capitol's power over the districts, but it also gives the people of the districts a chance to rebel on a nationwide stage. Curious about the extensive history of Panem’s grim annual event? Read on to learn more about the Games.
The origins of the Hunger Games
The Capitol established the Games as punishment for a rebellion that took place more than 70 years before the events of the first book, The Hunger Games. The rebellion, a three-year civil war labeled “The Dark Days," closed with The Treaty of Treason, which allowed the Capitol to take even more oppressive control over the remaining 12 districts. The rebellion also spurred the government of Panem to establish the Hunger Games as retribution. The Games were to be played as followed: Two tributes from each district had to fight to the death, with only one victor remaining.
In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, we learn the true beginning of the Games. They were a thought experiment designed by a University student, Casca Highbottom. Highbottom was friends with Crassus Snow, father of future president Coriolanus Snow. Dr. Volumnia Gaul taught military theory to them at the University.
Highbottom was failing the class and was angry about it. For the final assignment, the two were instructed to “create a punishment for one’s enemies so extreme that they would never be allowed to forget how they had wronged you.” Highbottom was drunk and theorized the Hunger Games, while Snow egged him on. When Highbottom sobered up the next morning, he was horrified by his design. Even worse, he then found that Snow had submitted it to Dr. Gaul.
After the end of the Dark Days of the Civil War, Dr. Gaul presented the Games as a retaliatory action against the rebels and gave credit to Highbottom. After the announcement, Dr. Gaul also took the role of Head Gamemaker.
The early days of the Games
The first 10 years of the Hunger Games were a translation of Highbottom’s original design, escalated into a required viewing event for all the districts. The Hunger Games start with a ceremony known as the Reaping, held in each district. It’s a mandatory event where a citizen of the Capitol chooses two tributes (a boy and a girl, each between the ages of 12 and 18) by lottery from each of the 12 districts. Even after a name is drawn, however, someone can volunteer in a chosen tribute’s place.
The 24 selected tributes then travel to the Capitol and are paired with mentors who are supposed to help them with strategy and gameplay. The Capitol films and broadcasts the entirety of the Games, making it a mandatory viewing event for all districts.
While the specific details of each event are not known, here are a few of the most memorable Hunger Games in Panem’s history.
The 10th Hunger Games
By the time the 10th Hunger Games air, they've gotten stale—there’s no real question about who’s going to win. Children from the wealthier districts, specifically Districts 1 and 2, train for the Games and usually volunteer. They’re called “Career Tributes.” Tributes from poor districts, however, are weak and tend to get picked off in the arena first. The Games are so formulaic and over so quickly that there’s barely time to root for anyone.
This is the context in which we meet 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Snow is eager to be a mentor to a successful tribute so he can secure his place at the University. However, instead of a sure winner from one of the wealthy districts, he’s saddled with a poor District 12 tribute named Lucy Gray Baird.
After sending the tributes to the Capitol in a cargo train, they deposit them into a Capitol Zoo cage. There’s no interest in aesthetics: The Capitol Arena is a crumbling amphitheater, and the tributes are barely fed. During a tour of the Arena, Lucy Gray saves Snow from falling rubble after a bombing and makes him promise to help her win. Snow gives her his mother’s compact, which she fills with rat poison.
At the beginning of the Games, Lucy Gray’s charm, displayed when she sang at the Reaping and in her pre-Games interview, captivates viewers. The Gamemakers introduce betting and sponsor gifts so spectators can support their favorites. For the first time, the Games are entertainment instead of a chore. As Head Gamemaker, Dr. Gaul has also created genetically enhanced snake muttations to drive chaos in the Arena.
A few days in, Lucy Gray’s fellow tribute from District 12, Jessup, gets rabies and attempts to kill her. Snow gets another mentor to send water into the Arena and Jessup dies by a fall after a bout of hydrophobia. Lucy Gray holds Jessup while he dies.
Snow finds Dr. Gaul’s snake muttations before they’re released into the Arena. He puts a handkerchief that smells like Lucy Gray into the snake basket so they’ll recognize her scent instead of killing her. When the snakes surround Lucy Gray, she sings “The Old Therebefore.” The viewers believe she entranced them with her voice, stopping their attack.
Two other tributes remain, Reaper and Treech. At the same time, Snow gives an interview about Lucy Gray’s success despite growing up in District 12 and donations continue to pour in for her. When Treech goes after Lucy Gray, she kills him with a snake mutt from her pocket. Lucy Gray then waits out Reaper, also afflicted with rabies, until he’s exhausted and thirsty. He dies after he drinks from a puddle Lucy Gray has poisoned.
Through her own cleverness and the lavishing of gifts by enthralled spectators, Lucy Gray Baird becomes the most exciting winner in Hunger Games history. She and Snow made the Games a truly unmissable event.
However, Dean Highbottom finds out about Snow helping Lucy Gray and sends him to Peacekeeper training. At the end of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Snow returns to the Capitol and studies under Dr. Gaul, continuing to innovate the Games.
The Second Quarter Quell
The Quarter Quell was most likely an invention of Coriolanus Snow after he ascended to the presidency. The Quarter Quell was an even crueler version of the Hunger Games, designed to remind the people of the districts that they were under Capitol control. The Quarter Quells had new twists. For the First Quarter Quell (the 25th annual Hunger Games), for example, citizens had to vote for the two tributes to represent them.
The Second Quarter Quell (the 50th Hunger Games) has a different hook, with the doubling of participants. This particular Quell is the setting of Sunrise on the Reaping. Before the Reaping, the Capitol announced that they will take 48 tributes—two boys and two girls from each district. Haymitch Abernathy is one of the male tributes from District 12. Unlike other tributes, Haymitch and the other three from District 12 don’t have a past victor as a mentor because the only past winner from District 12, Lucy Gray Baird, disappeared shortly after she won.
In Catching Fire, Katniss and Peeta watch footage of Haymitch’s time in the Games. Only 16, Haymitch got attention for his sarcastic attitude in his interview with Caesar Flickerman. The Arena for this game is a lush environment where everything is poisonous. At the beginning of the Games, Haymitch grabs a knife and a well-stocked backpack from the Cornucopia at the center of the Arena. A large number of tributes die looting at the Cornucopia, several more consume poisoned food, and a volcano wipes out a dozen more tributes. In the woods, Haymitch finds more muttations in the form of squirrels and butterflies.
Haymitch forms an alliance with Maysilee Donner from his own district. They make it to the edge of the Arena, where Haymitch discovers that the boundary over the cliff is a force field. In their brief time apart, Maysilee is killed by bird muttations.
In Haymitch’s final showdown with a District 1 girl, he draws her to the edge of the Arena. She throws her axe at him and it goes over the cliff. It bounces off the force field Haymitch had discovered and sails back into the Arena, killing the girl and leaving Haymitch as victor.
Haymitch’s cleverness comes back to haunt him because President Snow is angry about the revelation of a flaw in the Capitol’s Arena. He kills Haymitch’s mother, brother, and girlfriend.
Since the Games, Haymitch remains traumatized by the violence and self-medicates with alcohol. Though we get the basic outline of how he succeeded in Catching Fire, the forthcoming prequel Sunrise on the Reaping will get into the details of his wiles and mental state in the Games.
The 74th Hunger Games
The morning of the 74th Hunger Games, we meet heroine Katniss Everdeen hunting outside the Seam neighborhood of District 12. Katniss, as exquisitely voiced by Tatiana Maslany, grimly narrates the Games’ cruelty: “To make it humiliating as well as torturous, the Capitol requires us to treat the Hunger Games as a festivity, a sporting event pitting every district against the others.” At the Reaping, her younger sister Primrose is chosen as tribute, and Katniss volunteers to go in her place.
Her fellow district tribute is Peeta Mellark, the baker’s son who once showed Katniss kindness while she was starving. They meet their mentor, Haymitch, the only surviving winner from District 12. He still drinks heavily and Katniss deems him unhelpful at first, but soon finds he gives good advice.
At the Cornucopia, Katniss bypasses the bow and arrow and grabs a backpack. She narrowly avoids the melee driven by the ultra-murderous Career Tributes, including Cato and Clove from District 2. Katniss retreats into the woods and nearly dies of dehydration, but she finds a pond and uses the iodine in her backpack to clean the water.
The next day, the Career Tributes, allied with Peeta, pursue Katniss up a tree. They decide to wait her out at the bottom. Instead, a young tribute from District 11 named Rue points out a hive of genetically enhanced tracker jackers. Katniss knocks it down and escapes. She forms an alliance with Rue, who reminds her of Prim.
They bond quickly, but Rue is killed by a boy from District 1, and Katniss kills him in retaliation. In a major act of defiance, Katniss decorates Rue’s body with flowers. She then finds Peeta, camouflaged in the river and suffering from a leg wound and tracker jacker stings. In a twist to ramp up the drama, the Gamemakers announce that two tributes from the same district can win together.
Katniss cares for Peeta and starts getting sponsor gifts, with Haymitch directing her to play up their romance to garner support. Katniss also goes to the Cornucopia to get medicine for Peeta. Clove attacks her, but Rue’s fellow district tribute, Thresh, kills Clove and lets Katniss go.
Another tribute that has been successfully hiding throughout the Games dies when she steals poisoned berries that Peeta had collected by mistake. Katniss and Peeta are the last ones standing alongside Cato. They all fight, but Cato is overtaken by wolf muttations.
When it’s just Katniss and Peeta, the Gamemakers announce that their earlier rule of two winners is no longer relevant. Realizing that they wanted to set up an epic final showdown between the young lovers, Katniss suggests they eat the poison berries. Instead of letting them break the Games, the Head Gamemaker announces Katniss and Peeta as joint victors.
The Third Quarter Quell
In Catching Fire, Katniss doesn’t have much to celebrate. She moved to the Victors’ Village with her mother, sister, and cat. Only Peeta and Haymitch are their neighbors. During her and Peeta’s victory tour, they have to act deeply in love. President Snow wants to make sure the public doesn't see the berries as defiance, but the act of a silly young girl in love.
Before the Quarter Quell reaping, Katniss already knows something awful is going to happen. President Snow announces tributes will be reaped from former victors. Katniss is the only female winner so she is chosen by default, and then Haymitch is chosen. Peeta volunteers in his place to be with Katniss.
When they arrive at the Capitol, Katniss and Peeta realize how different these Games will be from their first one. The victor tributes are angry and lethal. The audience is heartbroken about watching their favorite local celebrities fight to the death. During their interviews, they successfully use the spectacle enforced by the Capitol to drive anger against the oppressive government. Katniss wears her wedding dress, which transforms into a Mockingjay, the symbol of defiance, while Peeta continues to manipulate the narrative, announcing Katniss is pregnant.
Before the Games start, President Snow ensures that Katniss has to watch Peacekeepers beat and drag away her stylist, Cinna, who created the Mockingjay gown. Though the victor tributes briefly displayed solidarity by holding hands at the pre-Games interview, the beginning of the Games is an immediate bloodbath.
Katniss and Peeta ally with Finnick, a handsome and beloved victor from District 4, and his former mentor, Mags. Katniss also notices the force field that she found when reviewing footage with Haymitch. The group then teams up with fellow tributes Johanna, Wiress, and Beetee. They realize that the 12 sections of the body of water are a clock, with each hour introducing a new terror.
They hatch a plan to run Beetee’s wiring to a tree that gets struck with lightning. After attempting to focus that plan on electrocuting other tributes, a new plan takes shape. Katniss takes the end of the wire, attaches it to her bow, and shoots it up at the force field. The force field breaks, and the Arena starts to fall apart. Katniss, who had been shocked and paralyzed, wakes up in an aircraft on her way to District 13, which she had thought did not exist. Her act of defiance has kicked off the rebellion.
The final Hunger Games
After the rebellion that followed the 75th Hunger Games, detailed in Mockingjay, former District 13 leader Alma Coin takes the presidency. After the rebels have taken control of the Capitol, President Coin pitches a final Hunger Games to the surviving victors. She explains that they would reap the children of Capitol families who gained the most from oppressing the outer districts. The victors are divided, but Katniss and Haymitch tip the vote to yes.
On the day of Snow’s execution, Katniss instead kills President Coin, effectively ending the possibility of a future Hunger Games. After finding out that Coin ordered the attack that killed her sister, and her own experiences with the Games, Katniss chooses to end the horror instead of continuing the cycle of revenge.
The future of Panem
Katniss goes home to District 12 to heal emotionally and physically from the toll of two Hunger Games and a rebellion. Peeta returns with her. They help each other through their shared trauma and have two children together.
The Capitol could never snuff out the spark of hope amid opposition, and, as the Girl on Fire, Katniss Everdeen reignited the rebellion and reclaimed peace for all of Panem.
Julia Rittenberg is a writer with a love of good stories. She lives in Brooklyn with a ton of books and vintage tchotchkes that her cat politely does not knock over.
