We were recently fortunate enough to catch up with video game producer, designer, and project lead Antonio "Tony" Barnes, whose extensive credits include the likes of Desert Strike, Strider (2014) and Killer Instinct (2013), as well as many other titles from the past few decades.
One game Barnes gets asked about a lot is Buffy The Vampire Slayer, an Xbox exclusive which has never been ported or re-released since 2002. While the game has a cult following, its true legacy is perhaps less well-known; according to Barnes, it not only influenced the creation of one of the best action series of all time but also helped reboot a classic one-on-one fighting franchise.
"When we were working on the Xbox game Buffy the Vampire Slayer at The Collective, I wanted to get a buddy of mine in because he was a huge Buffy fan and he was a combat fan, and we had worked together on Nuclear Strike 64 — it didn't really pan out because the timing was bad," explains Barnes. "But what was funny is he went to go work on God of War and he apparently showed Buffy to David Jaffe [God of War's director]. From what I've been told, Jaffe stopped and had a team meeting, and he had everybody sit down and play Buffy and said, "Look at this' and then went and retooled the way that their levels and puzzles and pacing and things went. You know, that stuff gives me a warm fuzzy."
Barnes also reveals that Buffy was directly influenced by a famous Capcom PS2 title:
"Buffy wouldn't be Buffy if it wasn't for Capcom's Devil May Cry. So, at first, Buffy was a different game. It was more like Arkham Asylum. It was slower paced, less about direct-input combos and very deliberate in how you moved around. It was almost Tomb Raider-like in a sense of clamouring around and things like that. And then both James Goddard [who was the co-designer on Buffy] and I saw a demo of Devil May Cry at E3 one year, and we just said, 'Holy shit!'
James went back and locked himself in his office for a week and redid all the combat for Buffy and from there, I went and redid how our levels flowed and we worked together on what could kill things and and invented the whole idea about environmental kills. So I mean, we all influence each other in the games industry. I'm just happy to be part of the mix."
As Barnes says, Buffy was created by a studio known as The Collective, which would eventually combine with Shiny Entertainment to form Double Helix. Barnes went along for the ride, and his former association with Buffy helped shape another major Xbox exclusive: 2013's Killer Instinct reboot.
"The studio head said to me, 'Hey, we're pitching new products. Have you ever heard of Killer Instinct?'" he recalls. "So I helped with the pitch on that. At the time, James Goddard was [a design director] at Microsoft on Killer Instinct and, if you recall, he was the person who had worked with me at The Collective on Buffy and did all the combat. So it wasn't really a hard pitch for me to put together."