Jake Simpson (00:00)
So hey everyone, today I'm talking to Tony Barnes. Tony Barnes is a name in the gaming industry. Unlike anyone else, he has been around. I think you've probably been around in this industry longer than I have. Do you have any idea, Tony, how long you've been doing this?

Tony Barnes (00:14)
this is year thirty six.

Jake Simpson (00:16)
There you go. Pretty freaking long then. So you you've been doing this a while and you've been involved in some amazing products along the way. And you have a quite a varied career. And I I'd love to hear a lot about it. And that's partly what this podcast is all about. So what got what gave you the bug? How did you start out, Tony? What what was the thing that said made you go, you know what? I think I want to make games for a living.

Tony Barnes (00:39)
Well, I mean I saw Space Invaders, you know, in the arcade when I was eight and you know, that was that was like being hit by lightning. So of course I wanted to play all the new games and all that fun stuff. And then fast forward to when I was like what was it, eleven. they started putting computers in schools. I was lucky enough to grow up in the Bay Area where you know, there was a lot of people who

even were alumni or had kids that went to my you know, my junior high school. And so they they stuffed these apples into schools. Nobody knows what to do with them. I actually amazingly so. So I actually wanted to be I I wanted to grow up to be George Lucas and Ray Harryhausen. And I love animation and so I was doing like traditional stuff.

Jake Simpson (01:19)
You did.

Tony Barnes (01:35)
you know, like a two D drawing. And then I started getting into lots of stock motion. So like clay and all this all the kind of classics. And when the computers came along, of course it was like this black hole, you know, it was this gravity well that everybody went towards. I checked it out too and noticed that, you know, you could move a a pixel

a hell of lot easier than you could animate a you know, a clay or even Lego guy walking across. And I said, okay, let me let me try that.

Jake Simpson (02:12)
So so I'm gonna have to jump in here and I'm like so your entire career is built around laziness then?

Tony Barnes (02:19)
That and being anti social.

Jake Simpson (02:22)
well we're all there, mate. We were all there, sucking the home in our bedrooms, you know, not wanting to see the world and having ending up with, you know, posty white skin. Yeah, I we're all been there. But yeah, okay, keep going.

Tony Barnes (02:32)
'Cause I mean, again, you know, like it it's just like some of the bands I've had and stuff over the years, you know, coordinating people is just so tiresome. So coordinating a bunch of sixth graders who didn't really want to be into animation and stuff to make movies was a pain in the ass. But they sure wanted to play games. That's kinda how I got the bug was I was playing games, the the handful of games that some other kids had

had gotten hold of. You know, of course there was a what was it? what was I think? Oregon Trail and stuff like that. Really it was the more hardcore hardcore arcade games like there was like a Defender clone called Gorgon and you know there's like Space Invader clones and stuff. And there was a kid, he was an older kid, he was an eighth grader. He actually knew how to code and basics and things. So he made a simple maze game. It auto generated a maze

It put a point in the maze for you to get to, which was supposed to be the exit. And then, you know, it just sat there and waited for input and and let you move in four directions and whatnot. So this kid made that game. I don't know where he learned it and I wish I could remember his name because I have to thank him. Because between him and and my sixth grade math teacher, Miss Hill, who let me just run rampant on the apples, that's kind of where it all began. Like he he showed me his game and then

I said I really would love to know how to do that, but I'll never be able to figure it out and he hit the brake key. Which nobody knows what the hell a brake key is nowadays. I don't even know if they have anymore.

Jake Simpson (04:08)
huh. Yeah, no you you mean that.

Tony Barnes (04:10)
But you know, he hit the break key and he typed list, which showed the code. Yeah. And I I watched all these words fly by and it was like, you know, it was like the Matrix. I I could understand what it was saying. And I started changing variables and whatnot and seeing how that worked and and just kind of went from there. And like my first, I say, official game was was called Galactic Conquest.

Jake Simpson (04:14)
Basically.

Tony Barnes (04:40)
And it was basically ski or as the kids nowadays would call an endless runner. spaceship at the top of the screen and I and I randomly generate a track per se that you or or like a you know, it was it was the the late seventies, so or no, that was early eighties, so would have been a Star Wars trench in my mind, you know. And so you go down the trench as long as

Jake Simpson (05:04)
Of course.

Tony Barnes (05:08)
can without bumping into the sides or any random pixel that I

Jake Simpson (05:14)
So so kind of like the Star Wars trench run or even I think Buck Rogers, the arcade game Buck Rogers sounded very similar to that.

Tony Barnes (05:22)
Yeah, imagine that, but much cruder and curving. So I I I grew up super poor, like dirt poor. Many many, many days of not eating and whatnot. And making a game, all of a sudden you become popular. So I'm this poor little nerd kid, and all of a sudden I'm popular and all all walks of life in the school are coming up to me asking me, how'd I do it and all this and I said, like this, and I get

I got to a point where I could make certain things really rapidly, like within the course of a of an actual period, which was about fifty minutes. So I can make a game in probably about thirty to forty minutes and let people play. And then that turned into people wanting to pay me to make games for them.

Jake Simpson (06:15)
you were an entrepreneur at a very young age then.

Tony Barnes (06:18)
I I guess I mean I guess

Jake Simpson (06:22)
I mean it's amazing, dude. That's just that's great.

Tony Barnes (06:26)
It was just one those things where it was like people were like, Make me a game, make me a game. Because there were too many vectors coming at me at once, I had to figure out a way to triage it, you know. So I said, Okay, well, here's the queue and those of you that paid, get yours first, you know, and I'll I'll make you a game. I'll make you whatever you want for, you know, whatever, five bucks or whatever. It was probably less than that, because it was the eighties and and all that fun stuff.

But basically, you know, three to five bucks a game, right?

Jake Simpson (07:00)
Bucks

would but still take you to the movies in those days, right?

Tony Barnes (07:03)
yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean what what I used it for was eating lunch and buying comic books, which actually I ended up reselling a bunch of the comic books that I had bought because I I was more than willing to get on the bus and go across town to the comic book stores that are on the other side of town. But a lot of kids that was like that was like a trip to the moon to them. And so I get a hold of comic books that they had never ever seen. So I could resell those too. So I guess, yeah, I guess I was

an entrepreneur in engineer high. I never really

Jake Simpson (07:36)
Nobody thought about it that way, yeah.

Tony Barnes (07:38)
No, I was just rolling. I just I I just hustled. It's what you do when you're when you're poor and when you come from a family that's very work foc focused. We're we're all kind of workaholics in my family. I just

Jake Simpson (07:53)
Changed over the years for you for that then, has it?

Tony Barnes (07:56)
No, no, as a matter of fact I I'm still working right now as we're talking.

Jake Simpson (08:03)
So okay, so how what was your I mean, I guess that was your first professional environment, but I mean

Tony Barnes (08:09)
So that was that was more indie independent as as they put it nowadays or whatever. my I mean my first professional was Antic Software in eighty six. Yeah. So Antic, they were a magazine that was Atari centric. They actually started it with RC cars, but they latched onto the Atari pretty early, especially the computers. They along with magazines like Compute and Analog

would run reviews and talk about new games and then they'd also have type ins. So they'd have submissions from from people which are nowadays be called homebrews, and they would purchase the rights to them and then reprint them, whether they were in basic or assembly or whatever. And I once I got outside of school, you know, things like Ataris and C sixty fours and Sinclairs were

far more prevalent around than than an apple. Nobody really could afford an apple that I knew of. I cut my teeth on the Atari 8 bit because a a friend, sort of a friend, a friend of me, had one and he would let me use it. So I would walk over to his house, which was about three miles away, with my binder paper where I'd written down games that I was going to make and

I would type in over there and then debug and tune and whatever, you know, have my my five and a quarter that I

Jake Simpson (09:43)
right, yeah, with the with the clip out the side. So you got 'boat so you got double sided, right? Yeah, I remember. Yeah, I remember that, yeah.

Tony Barnes (09:48)
Double sided.

Yeah, 'cause I

Jake Simpson (09:53)
Can I just interrupt you for some time? Because I I've got to tell you, I did something incredibly similar. when I was a kid, I was too poor. This is before I could I had a Commodore 64 of my own. But a friend of mine had a Dragon 32, which at the time, yeah, he had a I've I've actually got one in a box somewhere actually in my my console collection. He had a Dragon 32. And at the time my brother had just had a car accident, rather desperate, and he was on life support and it wasn't sure that he was gonna survive. And I was

Going for exams and I buried myself in programming and learning basic and I was doing exactly the same thing. I was writing all this stuff out in a binder and then going over to this guy's house and typing it all out to see what worked and what didn't. And did I understand BASIC properly or not? Whatever. I was doing exactly the same thing. I you know, I've always felt like we have similar career trajectories, and now I understand why. It's like we're so so similar, so come from the same places. Wow, that's fascinating. Indeed, yeah, very much.

Tony Barnes (10:47)
The real bedroom coating.

Yeah, it's funny. There you know, on Netflix there's the sh mirrors, the black mirror offshoot kind of thing.

Jake Simpson (11:00)
yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. About the about the eighteen.

Tony Barnes (11:03)
Yeah. Yeah, and I saw that and and got seriously choked up. Like I told I I tell this to everyone and I and I told everyone at the time, I said I've seen plenty of movies and things that have elements where they talk about making video games and they're all wrong. They're all cute little Hollywood things. Mm-hmm. The closest I've ever seen is Bandersnatch. Even though Bandersnatch of course is insane and goes off into

crazy directions depending upon your choices. But it was the first thing I seen that I'm like, my God, that is how it was when I first started. I wasn't in the UK, but I might as well have been the way that I came up through the business. And and certainly a lot of my early comrades and stuff on in game development were actually in the UK because we all kind of shared the same mentality for these things.

kind of came up through the demo scene the same way. So

Jake Simpson (12:03)
Just to to again go tell you so so Bandersnatch, I Bandasnatch wasn't actual supposed to be a product actually from Imagine that was originally supposed to be. But the interesting thing in the Black Mirror Netflix thing, one of the characters, the side characters in there is actually played by Jeff Minter from Llamasoft, and who is my hero. He's the guy that I'm got me into game making games and I wouldn't have any career without him. And to see him in that was like a moment of like, you know that that meme of

of Leonardo DiCaprio pointed at pointing at the screen. That for me was like, my god, that's Chip, that's Chip, you know, it's it's yeah. Yeah, a lot of similarity here. Yeah. So so okay, you work in antics, right. So this is magazine.

Tony Barnes (12:44)
So the magazine also, you know, besides having the the magazine and all that, it also published video games. You know, they would take submissions for the magazine and they would also publish sometimes they'd bundle those things and they'd also publish things straight to their Antic program exchange or I forgot exactly APX thing. So I noticed their submission quality kind of went down. And it it was like I felt like I was watching a

friend Dumble or something. On the mag you could see the address of where they where their offices were. And it was in downtown San Francisco. And I just lived on the outskirts. So so I I actually made three games. I think it took me like two weeks or so. I made three games, put them on the disc and I walked it over to Antich, which is about three miles away or so, three and a half from my house.

And walked into the office and handed the disc to the receptionist. She was like w

Jake Simpson (13:51)
That's not not normally how we accept submissions, but okay.

Tony Barnes (13:56)
Now what what's amazing is that she actually got it to wherever the submissions department was. I I I'm eternally grateful for that too, because I clearly didn't follow protocol.

Jake Simpson (14:09)
and no change there either.

Tony Barnes (14:10)
Yeah. What was I so I was fourteen when I did that. I can't remember. It was a couple of months later I got a nicely typed letter, which I actually still haven't. I need to get it mounted and framed and all that. But with the exception of one of the games which was called Dynamite Dan. Yes, I was unaware that there was a

Another game called Dynamite Dan, 'cause it was a more famous Dynamite Dan for most people who played on the Specy and all that. But that's neither here nor there because they sent me paperwork to sign away my rights and then sent me a check. So that game took me about nine, maybe ten hours to make. The and it was a check for twenty five hundred bucks in in nineteen eighty five.

Jake Simpson (15:04)
Holy cow, dude. So you're out there buying video cameras and

Tony Barnes (15:07)
Well, so here's the funny thing. I go to my mother and I said, Hey, can you cash this check for me? Because I've I'm fourteen, I don't have a bank account. I'm actually thinking about the whole thing of having a minor sign a contract now. That was the eighties. Maybe it was okay. But whatever. So I go to my mother and say, Hey, can you cash this check? And she's like, you know, gobsmacked like what what is this for? What what?

I said, yeah, you remember those games you told me to stop playing? Well, this is for one that I was actually making. And she said, Really? how long did it take you to make that? And I said, you know, it's like a day or so. And she said, Really? Well, you can keep playing those games for now.

Jake Simpson (15:57)
Yeah, but she said that.

Tony Barnes (15:58)
Right. And at that point she actually had been saving anyway to get me a computer 'cause I was so into them and all that. She bought an Atari twelve hundred XL for me. love that thing. I wish I had I wish I had never gotten rid of it. She bought me an Atari that she had saved up for. and then I gave her a bunch of money to, you know, help pay bills and all that fun stuff.

And then I bought a take drive and a a little TV to sit on top of the broken ol bigger TV. But that became my first machine. I made another game, sent it to them, and they got back to me and said, Hey, you know, we'd like for you to come in and talk. Now, what's interesting is i in the interim I hadn't even seen

the game in the magazine or anything. They apparently figure you know once you sign and everything that you're good and it's on you to figure out what what issue it's in and everything. So a friend of mine had actually called me and said, I have the magazine and you're in it and it's on the shelves. And I'm like, really? Wow. So I get the magazine and that changed the game. And even in the article it says that

we found the game really fun and everything, but thought the theme was a little generic. and because the code and everything was so clean and understandable, they just dove in and s and like reskinned it. They didn't touch any of the gameplay mechanics or the levels. They just, you know, changed the art and reskinned it and turned it into escape from hell. So it instead of it being a platformer where you're a little

stick figure collecting dynamite sticks and running away from a robot and hitting little springboards to launch you into the into the air, it became you were someone sentenced to hell for your programming sins. And and you were running away from the devil and you were saving the souls of other Atari gamers. And the little springboards that would send you flying were actually the flames of hell.

What's interesting is I've actually gotten letters from people who have used the game in their Sunday school classes.

Jake Simpson (18:28)
Well, I I particularly like the the programming sins though. That there's a few people I quite like to send to hell for programming sins I've encountered over the years. I'm looking at you, Mr. Tim Sweeney. That's great. That is a terrific

Tony Barnes (18:44)
As an early user of Unreal I will think

Jake Simpson (18:52)
That's brilliant. I love

Tony Barnes (18:54)
I I I don't know if they were afraid or apologizing or genuine or whatever, but they invited me in and then and then gave me a a job after that at Antic Publishing. So that was my even though I I mean I guess you could say the game s submissions were first official. I don't know. I mean I guess I mean 'cause I sent it to someone and they paid for it. It's contract and all that fun stuff. Or you know, my first official job.

was working for Antic. No.

Jake Simpson (19:26)
you're doing in antics though?

Tony Barnes (19:29)
So what's interesting is they just wanted to be in the Tony Barnes business, I think. They they just wanted to hand me a job of anything because at first I was just sitting there cranking out games. So I have I think four or five published through them. Then I was doing producer work on because they were shifting as the Atari eight bits were kind of winding down, there was the ST, the sixteen bit, and the Amiga.

And they they were supporting them the same way they supported the Atari with a magazine and with like a kind of a shareware or whatever kind of pre indie publisher program kind of thing. So

Jake Simpson (20:10)
Those cover disc things as well. Remember those days where lots of magazines had the cover disc with demos or something like that on it, or little little utilities and sometimes demos of games. I remember that.

Tony Barnes (20:20)
Yeah. So I actually ended up I p I was a producer on a lot of things from you know, US gold coming over here, a shooter called Gunsmoke and a weird platformer Bobo and all these weird little little games, archipelago, there were so many of them. The big thing was doing development and support on tools. So they had on the Atari ST they had a thing called Cyberpaint, which was kind of a pre

cursor to D Paint. And then they did an Amiga version of it called Philotrope. And I worked on that because I could also do pixels and hay animation beside code and stuff. So helped a lot with the interface on that and did a lot of of demos. If you ever get a hold of it or you'll see any demo disc, you probably see one of my animations that were included in there. And all this was happening really rapidly too. I mean we're talking about over a course of a of a few months.

one of the things was they had gotten the rights to DOS STOS and Amos AMOS. Those are programming languages. They're basically full on IDs, you know, they they have everything in it it it was Unity before Unity, essentially. They needed someone with that and GFA basic and GFA Assembler who could do North American co technical customer service. So

Me being the kid, as it was called, I just said, I can do it for all of them which you know, they love because that just means less less Yeah. We'll just pay the kid. So I was technical alone technical customer service for essentially two no, three programming languages over four SKUs.

Jake Simpson (21:57)
That's people to pay.

Reclam for punishment.

Tony Barnes (22:13)
Bait you know you want to talk about punishment. Man, trying to debug someone's code over the phone, not like not like now where I could like Yeah. But it was good practice for the jobs and things that I would do later because what I ended up doing was a lot of times I I'd be talking to someone and we rabbit hole on whatever command it was or whatever, and I said, you know what, all of that

Jake Simpson (22:24)
Screen share and yeah.

Tony Barnes (22:42)
Let's put that to the side. Can you tell me what it is you intend on doing? What what is it that you want to do? versus what right. And that approach really got it where I could help people on on how to approach h you know, doing it and get off the phone quicker with them so I could get back to whatever I was doing. And and and that really helped me later on. And I mean it's really this I I still work that way. Anyone that's what I'm working with

Jake Simpson (22:50)
The code does, yeah.

Tony Barnes (23:12)
I'll be like, what's your intent? Well let's not get, you know, bogged down in the minutia the zeros and ones. What is your intent with this thing?

Jake Simpson (23:20)
So you're starting at the ten thousand foot view and then then coming down into the into the weeds afterwards when you already know what the intent is, I see.

Tony Barnes (23:27)
Yeah. Because otherwise otherwise we're just we would just be sitting there spinning on certain commands and whatnot and I'm trying to figure out their code across the phone. It was just it it was insane. So it's just like, Okay, what do you want to do? here's how to do it. Thanks. Goodbye.

Jake Simpson (23:45)
The I f I have a good friend who calls that arguing the bits. Instead of looking at the words or the string, you're arguing the bits and that's an interesting way, yeah. I see. You came to that boy yourself too. Smart.

Tony Barnes (23:54)
Yeah. At at at age, whatever it was fifteen or sixteen. Fricking kid.

Jake Simpson (23:59)
I've always hated you, Tony.

So okay. All right. So what what happens next then? What what happens to your life after the you know so antic last four and then

Tony Barnes (24:15)
of the many bubbles that people seem to forget that we have around these parts was circa 8990 plus a shift away from micros like the Atari and the Amiga into you know other things. So by the time that happened, when was I 17 and I looked older. Now that I think back, I'm not sure how much older I looked.

'Cause I can recognize a seventeen year old versus a twenty one year old. But whatever. So I got led in the bars. And there was a local bar that I would go to. It was very much like the bar in Hackers, but it didn't have a big giant fifty inch screen with people playing wipeout. But it was I mean, the the clientele looked like that, the music was pre that, but it was kinda, you lots of

Jake Simpson (25:06)
Did

have Angelina Jolie hanging out and and anyone named Zero Cool.

Tony Barnes (25:10)
It did actually have a girl that looked like her, yeah. But I you know, I would go to this bar after work and drink and hang out and play pool. One day I'm sitting there and I have my discs for something. Three and a three and a half. I'm at the bar and this guy comes up to me and sits next to me and he's got a mohawk, a bike chain for a for a necklace.

And like his jacket's very road warrior. He's all, what are those for? And I'm like thinking, great. Yeah. This guy's it's not it it was purely me thinking, this guy's not gonna understand. Right? It wasn't a this guy with a mohawk is off putting. It was more cute. Yeah, and it was more just

You know, me going, there's no way he he has a clue. He doesn't look like Bill Gates or anything. So I said, Well, I make games and this is some work I'm taking home. He's like, Really? I do too. And he whips out his badge from Epics, which are are the makers of the Atari Lynx, which he was working on. And come to find out he's a artist and he was working on like California games and a bunch of other stuff. his name is Matt Chrysdale. hey Matt.

He introduced me to his friend Greg Thomas, who Greg Thomas and I had a lot in common because we're both huge Prince fans. So I meet Matt Chrysdale, Greg Thomas, and Scott Patterson, and they were three of four or three or five for a little company called Visual Concepts, which is now I think called Big Two Sports or whatever. Yeah, so I end up when things went

Jake Simpson (26:57)
Yeah.

Tony Barnes (27:03)
My things went nipplesworth on on on At Antich. I end up bunking with visual concepts and working on Amiga ports of their Apple two G S games 'cause that's where they got their start as the Apple T G S. And then we became good buddies and all this. And then I end up having my first set of twins. Yes, I have I have two sets of twins. So all of a sudden I go from a guy that's just hanging out

whatnot to a guy that needs like kind of a steady income and benefits, more importantly. So Greg Thomas got me a job at Britannica Software. And Britannica Software were literally a the software arm of Encyclopedia Britannica. And they were getting into this new thing called C D ROM.

Jake Simpson (27:55)
right.

Tony Barnes (27:55)
Yes. So I ended up working with working with them or working for them. The Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia, which shipped in nineteen ninety, if I remember correctly, was actually one of the first CD ROM products, period. Like one of the first like ten. And certainly running on Windows three point one. And it was funny because I make games and I make not just games, I make like

serious arcadey games. I told them their stuff, you know, their edutainment stuff was cute, but it was pretty dry. Like I had literally played spelicopter in school not too many years before that. And it was spellicopters like imagine a a crude choplifter, but you're, you know, making letters, you know, you're picking up letter passengers and making words. And I said they should be more like games, game games.

and disguise all of the learning. I proposed actually hooking up with this new company doing this new thing call Nintendo and we should get on their Nintendo PlayStation, which we did, sort of.

Well

Jake Simpson (29:16)
there was originally a dev kit th know that there was a dev kit, but it would never actually made it out of the world, did it?

Tony Barnes (29:21)
No, no, there no, there's there's dev kits around. There's probably a dozen out there in the wild. We actually found out that that everything was foobard at CES, which was one of the last CES I ever went to, clearly. But we had we had these games on the go with the Berenstein Bears. not Bernstein, not Bernstein, but Berenstein. trust me.

Jake Simpson (29:24)
no, yeah.

Tony Barnes (29:51)
I remember sitting there at at our little booth getting ready to show, you know, these these arcade games with hidden hidden education in them. And I remember seeing my boss in a bunch of suits walk in and standing and having that that that nervous tension look and then going into a back room and then coming out to me and going, Yeah, why don't you just like go walk around the Yeah, why don't you just go walk around, go check out what's going on at the sands or

Jake Simpson (30:15)
The exhibition.

Tony Barnes (30:21)
Yeah, we found out the same way that practically everyone else found out that CES that Nintendo had backed out and left Sony h holding the bag. Yeah, that was fun. Because it was also, like I say, it was kind of my baby and I'd kinda kinda pushed the company into into doing all that and getting more involved with consoles and whatnot. The way I looked at it was

The consoles are kinda gonna be the future. You look and it's like a PC. I mean, who's got money for that? And what parents are gonna necessarily let their kid, you know, install some you know letters and all that stuff at that time. But have a Nintendo or a Sega or or a SNES, sure.

Jake Simpson (30:59)
I'm

You

weren't wrong. I mean, you know, y you certainly weren't wrong in your instincts, were you? It was just it was just the particular horse that you backed. The race itself was exactly what you said it was gonna be.

Tony Barnes (31:18)
Yeah. I mean part of it was just me being selfish because I love making an arcade game. So making kind of the way they were doing edutainment stuff wasn't really working for me. And actually e most edutainment stuff nowadays is a lot like my approach, which is game first.

Jake Simpson (31:35)
Education options, yeah.

Tony Barnes (31:36)
Yeah, 'cause I feel like and I think it's I I think it's proven out that you know, kids will learn through osmosis. And so you don't necessarily have to make it so stiff and just wrote. They get that from school. What was interesting was shortly after that, Greg Thomas again gave me a call and said, Hey, how you doing? You know, I've got some people over electronic arts that are looking for like person that's kinda like design and code.

Maybe do some pixels or something. You know anybody like that?

Jake Simpson (32:11)
Yeah.

Tony Barnes (32:14)
And I mean, you know, contrary to how things go nowadays and whatever the word is on the on the interwebs, you know, for people to hate, back in the day, Empire Empire. Electronic arts was like a coveted place to work. Especially for a kid like me growing up in the Bay Area. It was like I wanna work for I wanted to work for electronic arts.

I wanted to work for LucasArts. Those were like, yeah, and once I do that, that's it. I've I've reached the pinnacle. And so the opportunity to work at electronic arts, I really didn't care what it was. I was just like, Yes. I get to go in there and I get to do what I do all the time. For a company that I I grew up and admired. Yeah, sure. So I was hired to work on this thing, favorite breakout.

Which I think is more known as Desert Strike and the Strike series. Mm-hmm. But before I could do all that, they were making lots of engine changes and engine engine in general, because unlike today, no games really had engines per se. You made the game and maybe you recycled some code for the

Jake Simpson (33:35)
You

might recut cycle one little bit of it or just your rendering loop or something like that. Yeah. I know exactly what you're talking about. There was no engine per se, there was just an awful lot of code.

Tony Barnes (33:44)
Yeah. And the lead engineer Mike Busane, he came from a a tools background, but he wanted to he wanted to get into games and he was really hot to trot on doing this simulation. Now, myself and John Manley of the Strike series, co father, I guess, I don't know. Neither one of us were huge on simulations. And so we took our cues more from

Zaxon, of course, the one all that stuff. Choplifter is the common game between us two. And then I grew up with another one called Ford Apocalypse, which is on the Atari in the C64. And Ford Apocalypse was like Choplifter on steroids. It had all manner, like a whole palette of of enemies, you know, other choppers, and it and it had vertical scrolling as well as horizontal.

And it even had like this these weird underground laser gates you had to go through and all that stuff. So we looked at that and our our producer, Rich Robbins, was real big on the military and all that. And I mean, sure, you know, Desert Storm, I think it was over. Yeah, it was over by the time we were out. But he ended up going, you know, like I said, from Big Rit Breakout to the rename to Desert Strike. From there the strike series was born.

so in the interim of waiting for things to get ready for all that and also next strike, which actually became Jungle Strike, I touched a lot of other games in a good way. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (35:28)
Not not in a darkened room.

Tony Barnes (35:30)
Yeah. But like EA had gotten a hold of and licensed a lot of action stuff, you know, action games and stuff, and was really bullish on the Genesis because not only reverse engineering the hardware, but you know, came to a nice agreement with Sega unlike with Nintendo. So a lot of things weren't r the they were relatively easier, I'll I'll put it that way, to port from the Amiga.

To a Sega Genesis than other machines. So again, kind of the demo scene and whatnot. I ended up producing a lot of action games. And our our producer for Desert Strike had a full plate, and he only had two people before I came along. So then also he had three. So we did a lot of arcade games and Crew Ball, which was a heavy metal pinball with motley crew music, a bunch of platformers and

man, I don't know. The list goes on. It's funny, I mentioned doing a port f so there was sort of sedan on the Apple II. This is sort of rewinding a little. But anyway. And that was a port that Visual Concepts did from the Amiga to the Apple IIGS. And then later on I end up working on the port momentarily for it from

think it came from the Amiga to the to the Genesis. I'm I'm hoping so 'cause I wouldn't want to go from sixty five eighteen C to sixty eight thousand. But anyway, yeah, it is a weird circle. A lot of times also I would we kind of had a pact early on, Visual Concepts and I where we'd work on each other's games. Like Visual Concepts did the port of Desert Strike to this to the SNES. I work on Madden

Yeah, because they were working on that and

Jake Simpson (37:29)
Are you still coding at this time or are you have you moved more into the production design area?

Tony Barnes (37:34)
Yes. No. I'm do I'm still I'm doing less coding because like I said, Mike Bussain was doing the heavy lifting on the engine site and he wrote so he wrote all the stuff for the scrolling and collision and all this and he ended up writing a I don't wanna say scripting language 'cause it was still assembly. It was just a few yeah, it was a few wrappers for things that I needed to do to

code the missions in the strike series. 'Cause initially like desert and jungle are all hand laid out. All of that stuff was done on graph paper as far as coordinates go. yeah. And then all of the enemies, every single drop of them, with the exception of where they're they're rotating to to home in on the player, all of that is hand coded. If you it always old school. yeah.

It cracks me up when people say, yeah, blah, blah, blah, and the AI and yeah, and I and I laugh. I'm like, there's no AI. I mean, I guess it it's all perception. I at one point actually wanted to make my own game company and call it smoke and beers. It really is that. So like every little guy is running around, every tank and everything is all hand coded. So that was that was the code that I was doing at that point. Was I I don't wanna call it scripting 'cause it's not like scripting today.

Jake Simpson (39:03)
You're not necessarily writing the whole game from scratch, as it were. You're working within c you know, constrained areas and you're doing specific gameplay specific stuff, right?

Tony Barnes (39:12)
Yeah. I d you know, did all the gameplay like a like a gameplay program is sort of, but mm like a like a technical design. I don't know. There's no modern equivalent for it really. Less coding, more design, some coding, some pixels.

Jake Simpson (39:31)
So you're you're done with with the strike series. What's next?

Tony Barnes (39:36)
nasty transition, 3DO, 32X actually. 32X and 3DO came along. I can't tell which one screwed over the business more, or certainly my my trajectory in it, but those machines kind of came along at the same time and they were this weird middle ground. And so all of a sudden I had a momentum loss.

We'd done the strike series in between the strike series or sometimes during. I was doing, you know, other arcade stuff or working on Madden or NHL or whatever, right? Then comes this period where it's like, what do we do? I don't know. And I I designed Future Strike. And Future Strike was meant to be kind of a last hurrah and a little more arcadey, because it was sci fi. On the Genesis. What ended up happening is that the the proposal and everything that we had done

for it was so well received outside of the you know the EASM or now ERS, the h the headquarters, that like Japan had moved on. They were well past caring about the Sega or even the Super Nintendo at that point. They were mostly interested in you know, what would become the N sixty four and anything else, like the Sega Katana, which is a dreamcast. These things they were they were looking forward to. So

that got put on ice, the future strike got put on ice because they were like, What do we do? And if it if it runs up against what became Soviet strike, you know, that becomes an issue, blah blah blah. At that point, I also was thinking, Well, I want to do something different. What's interesting is I'm a glutton for pr punishment. I've often looked at license games and said, I don't understand why they're bad.

I do not understand why they're bad now. I said, you know what? I could do so much better. And I'm a put up or shut up kind of guy. Friend of mine, who had gone to Crystal Dynamics, he contacted me and said, Hey, I'm over here at Crystal D and I need someone to take on this project. I've got a Ghost Rider and Punisher license. You want them? And I said, What can I do with them? And he said, anything you want.

And I said, okay, so I'm gonna turn Punisher into Contra and I'm gonna turn Ghost Rider into Castlevania Bloodlines. Is that cool with you? He's all anything you want. I said, okay, I'm there. So I went, designed Ghost Rider. we had this wonderful developer called Tiburon, who I had worked with previously, because they offshoot of visual concepts. And then things got ugly and Madden ninety-six.

It nuked the fridge or shit the bed or whatever EA ends up buying Tibberon, turning them into EA Tiburon. I can't blame my buddies for going where the money's at. So I lose the developer for Ghost Rider. And we're talk you know, in the middle of talking to other people like Neversoft and whatnot, who also end up getting gobbled up by Activision. They said, Hey, we've got this other game and it really needs some help.

Jake Simpson (42:29)
Phrase you wanna use, yeah.

Tony Barnes (42:55)
Help, especially in the mechanics department, which is my department definitely. My department is definitely mechanics and balance and layout. Wow, that's that's a few. But anyway, I'm really good at those things. not so good at narrative, but that's fine. You know why? Because Silicon Knights had written three hundred pages of of lore for Legacy of Cain, but no game design. So an artist who

hadn't really worked directly with, but we knew each other over at EA had come over and her name was Amy Hennick and she took on the the huge task of dealing with the lore that silicon knights had. I became an expensive cartographer, making, you know, all of the level layouts and kind of flow and gating and all that fun stuff. Because even though they thought they were almost alpha, they were not.

it's funny I remember saying, Yeah, we're gonna beat Zelda, which would have been Linked to the Past at the time. And let me tell you, nothing beats Link to the Past. And so I looked and said, Well, when was the last time you guys played Zelda? 'Cause you know, you don't have any gating, you don't have this, you know, that so went about the business of making this, that and the other and all that. And again, while doing that, I was also working on other things within the office.

Jake Simpson (44:03)
Mm.

Tony Barnes (44:24)
providing, you know, testing and and I was probably the closest to where I've actually been like just testing on things like gas.

Jake Simpson (44:31)
Well, you did say you were a workaholic.

Tony Barnes (44:34)
Yeah. Well, it's i I just I I itch if I'm not doing something. Mm-hmm. and so sometimes there'd be downtime and I'm just like, I I what, you need help? I'm here.

Jake Simpson (44:46)
Right. Excuse me.

Tony Barnes (44:49)
Plus sometimes you look over the wall and you and someone's doing something really cool. And it's it's really hard to do it nowadays. But back then you go, Hey, and and jump in, especially if you're someone that's kinda multidisciplined, you can just like jump in and and help wherever. So I did that with a bunch of crystal stuff. In particular the stuff they were porting from, you know, three Dio to the Sega Saturn and the Playstation. Like I say, like Gex and Total Eclipse, like a shooter and and

All kinds of stuff. And those are good times. Like

Jake Simpson (45:22)
So Amy Heddeck of course hasn't done anything since. No, I

Tony Barnes (45:26)
I

don't know what happened to her.

Jake Simpson (45:28)
I don't know either, yeah. idea.

Tony Barnes (45:31)
Yeah. But I I hope sh I hope she's able to figure out how to write a decent story one day or something. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (45:39)
Yeah. I hope so too. For those who aren't aware of the the joke we're having, Emmy Hennick created the Uncharted. and she she was majorly responsible for The Last of Us, I think, the original Last of Us as well. And has gone on to have absolutely stellar career and done some amazing things and unfortunately didn't get her Star Wars game made, which really sucks because I really would have enjoyed playing that. Uncharted, but with Star Wars. Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme. I mean I never understood.

I'll I'll tell you that you can't.

Tony Barnes (46:09)
People because because when I say, you know, Kane and Legacy of Kane, they kind of wrap me all up into the entire series and, you know, thanks for the love and everything. But really that's that's Amy's thing. You know, I just worked on the first one and I can see, you know, from the I remember that Ghost Rider thing. I I can see like some mechanics in Soul Reaver that were in the ghostwriter docs, whether they used them or not, I don't know. But

Ghost Rider is definitely Amy's baby. Or sorry, Soul Reaver is definitely Amy's baby because I had moved on. God, I don't even remember why. But yeah, like the mid to late nineties were weird because everything had shifted to three D. Nobody wanted to hear anything about two D. And it's not that I didn't know three D, 'cause I I did somewhat.

Jake Simpson (47:05)
Yeah, but your heart's still in it though. In two in the two D I understand exactly where you're coming from. The same with you it's the same with me with Age of Empires, for example. You know, it's like my heart's still in the two D aspect of it, even though the three D stuff that Age four's done is absolutely stellar and amazing. I'm still yeah I kinda like that whole two D aspect of it. I understand where you're coming from though, but yeah. So so where'd you end up? Where'd you go next?

Tony Barnes (47:26)
so I ended up actually doing a lot of consulting to various places, which again, you know, just helps to bloat the the list of games. Then again, you know, this business is all about about all about friends and everything and who you know. So other buddy of mine had gone to a sort of startup called Post Linear and they had this this technology called Transactor. And the reason I'm actually getting into the weefs on this is 'cause

Jake Simpson (47:42)
Who you know, yeah.

Tony Barnes (47:56)
Funny. The technology was to authenticate people buying what they call LEDOS, limited edition digital objects.

Jake Simpson (48:06)
NFTs.

Tony Barnes (48:09)
And so they invented that technology in ninety seven, I think it was. And they figured the best way to get it adopted, which is true. I mean there's really kind of two ways to get new technology adopted. It's either porn or video games, it seems. And so they weren't gonna go the porn route. So they they had a video game company.

And they explained to me this whole thing about, you know, it's like magic carts except for it's digital. And I'm skeptical because I'm like, who the hell is going to pay for some digital bit, especially coming from my background where I would just I would just open up a hex editor and and hack the whole thing. Who cares? But that was kind of the point was the you know, the authentication servers and all this stuff would would make it so that even if it was hacked, that the second that

said game or whatever touched the internet which was coming along at the time, it would all get authenticated. So I thought about it and was like, interesting. But I had messed I had missed a couple of internet opportunities early on. And so that was nagging me. And then the big thing was again, someone offering me something that I I felt I couldn't pass up. again, the whole license thing.

which was we have the license to stargate and stargate's going to be making a new show called stargate stargate one with Richard Dean Anderson and it's funny my my my friend the producer said you know and Richard Dean Anderson yeah well he's he's he's he's no Kurt Russell but you know I've seen some dailies this show should be good

Jake Simpson (50:00)
Ten years of running of for for playing that character. I've just done actually a complete rewatch of all of the Stargate series from start to finish. I just went through all of them.

Tony Barnes (50:10)
Yeah.

I mean there's there's this

Jake Simpson (50:12)
Ten seasons of SG one. There's five of Stargate Atlantis and two of Stargate Universe. And then there's th two or three made for T V movies as well, I think.

Tony Barnes (50:24)
But

there's then there's movies on top.

Jake Simpson (50:28)
You know, I I remember when I went to Stargate Worlds to work on their MMO, I was there's so many stories I could tell you about that. that's a glorified Ponzai scheme if there ever was one. But yeah, it's it was fantastic though because they had so many props from the show. You even walk through a Stargate to get into the offices. It's a huge, huge Stargate, two thirds of a Stargate built into the floor and they had walls full of

F full of props and Zat guns and all the rest of it.

Tony Barnes (50:57)
see I would have loved that. At the time, like first of all I I I'm thoroughly convinced that Stargate is cursed 'cause everyone I know that's ever tried to work on or touched the licenses has tears to you know, to talk about. So yeah, we were actually cancelled and and like i in in some not so fun ways too. Like firstly

Jake Simpson (51:13)
yeah.

Tony Barnes (51:26)
My boss calls me and it was a Saturday and I had taken my machine home to work over the weekend. He said, Hey, you know you were gonna work over the weekend, just on speakerphone He said, No, you don't have to work over over the weekend anymore and I said, Do I have to come back into work at all? 'Cause I could kind of feel it when I would talk to the the produce bags from GM. But Yeah.

Jake Simpson (51:52)
Sorry, I haven't heard that one before either. Okay, fair enough. I get it.

Tony Barnes (51:58)
One of the other things to put a nice jab into it was that they were looking to shop it and one of the publishers who I I I won't name, they said, Yeah, we've looked at your game and it's okay, but your engine's not that great. And we've been looking at the Unreal engine and your engine doesn't compete with Unreal, so thanks and no thanks.

And I'm like, what are you talking about? We're making a game. Like it's not about it's not about some engine that's on the cover of magazines for the next few years and doesn't actually come out until until years later. So that was annoying. The final straw on that w little piece of heartburn I'll say was I had a friend who had gone into Universal Interactive. I think that was before they were Universal Vendy. It was before that, so yeah.

And was talking to them because they had a little movie that was coming up called The Mummy with this this kid Brandon Frasier. And so I thought that would be a good end 'cause nobody was really you know, it wasn't like that was a hot property at the time. It hadn't e it didn't exist. So it's like, hey, we've got all this Egyptian and stuff. We own everything that's not Stargate, which was a lot, 'cause that's the way I approach licensed games, is to make a lot of

original stuff that fits the universe and you know, hey, we own this engine. They were very interested, but then all of a sudden the powers that be at postlinear weren't interested and weren't weren't terribly happy with me trying to trying to do something or saying like, were you trying to sell your your game? I'm like, My game? This isn't my game, this is your game. I'm trying to I'm trying to save you guys, you know. This is this is a year and a half, two years of

Jake Simpson (53:22)
Yeah.

Tony Barnes (53:48)
of your life down the train. I'm just trying to make something happen. So didn't happen. The the publisher that will not be named, the game that they were backing didn't happen. Ha ha. And then I ended up from there was kind of looking around. And actually I was I was out of work for God, I think it was like nine months or something. in the Bay Area. Yay. Was just looking at

Jake Simpson (54:17)
Right.

Tony Barnes (54:20)
And so it's expensive and there's an influx 'cause this is about a time when the dot com boom was just off the charts. And the traffic's getting ridiculous, the houses getting ridiculous, job markets flooded with a bunch of wannabes. I'm s sitting in traffic and this guy in a BMW cuts me off, gives me a finger and

His license plate said big IPO. I'll never forget that. I wanted to ram my car into him. And I thought, you know what? I can leave. If I'm going to be someplace that that's filled with traffic and D bags, I could be like in LA or something. So I started looking around and I actually interviewed with a few places, including like Westwood.

Jake Simpson (55:13)
Nevada though.

Tony Barnes (55:14)
Yeah.

Yeah, that was that was Nevada. Kinda glad I didn't go there 'cause it would end up back here anyway. Retro Studios in Austin. Yeah, I actually had a verbal from them until I went in for an interview and the the studio head at the time literally said to me, You don't look the way you sound and then all of a sudden the rest of the interviews were were canceled. and yeah, yeah.

Jake Simpson (55:41)
Really?

Tony Barnes (55:44)
I usually hide who that was, but you know what? But that's okay. He he got his. I actually really liked the collective. I really liked the people I talked to. And so no, so they were down down in Southern Cal in on Laguna Beach. Literally like a block and a half away from the beach. You could go out out onto the deck of the office and you could see the beach.

Jake Simpson (55:57)
Bay area though.

Tony Barnes (56:13)
You know, you're having a bad day, you go out on a deck, watch the sunset, you know. So I really liked their attitude. I liked the founders that I met that kind of reminded me of diehard villains. Very very slick, well dressed Europeans. Even down to their website. It w it just had like a it had an air about it that I liked. I said, Okay, these are my people.

And they wanted me they they had they had Aeon Flux and Star Trek D S nine and I can't remember if it was known or not that they were doing Buffy. I think so. They're clearly doing license stuff. And I saw what how they felt about licenses. It wasn't like, this is just shovelware to do. You know, it was like they were genuine fans of of the licenses and I said, Okay, this should work. And yeah, I mean I I guess it did. I was there for

Five years.

Jake Simpson (57:11)
We shouldn't talk about that. We should talk little bit about Buffy because this is where one of the first times I came across Tony, 'cause I was an avid Buff Buffy viewer and player on the Xbox that was. And I played the crap out of that game until I reached one particular level and I spent a week trying to get past this level. It was in Syracuse. Yes, it was under dark and I was climbing around climbing around a the eaves of a of a

Storage area or something, I can't remember.

Tony Barnes (57:43)
I know exactly what you're talking about already.

Jake Simpson (57:45)
see, there you go. And I could not and I afraid I lost my temper. Might have got broken in half, I don't remember.

Tony Barnes (57:50)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I I think I know the majority of the shelf moments in the games I've made. Some of them I actually know as they're going out. I'm like, my god, this is yeah, this is a controller thrower. But I don't have time to fix it.

Jake Simpson (58:11)
It was a great game though. It was a really good game. Yeah.

Tony Barnes (58:14)
The docs is so if I could go back and just there's two things that it's it's too low on ammo. Well, there's three things. Too low on ammo. It's very punitive for if you get knocked in the water, and it has bad guys that literally their job is to knock you in the water. And then I don't teach you how to play the way that we played it to make it seem

Jake Simpson (58:40)
That's right. I had a bow. I had a bow and arrow and a set of different arrows. And there was fire arrows and there was water arrows and stuff like that. I remember that. And you had like something like three arrows or something at this point where where I'm climbing around these eaves, I've got three arrows and that's it. It's like

Tony Barnes (58:55)
yeah, see the vamps, that's where your water, you know, your holy water goes to. But the fire w what's interesting is I people didn't really understand that once something's on fire, it's taking damage that entire time. So you don't want to overuse whatever fire thing you have. You want to set something on fire and then just do as fast damage as you can. It's getting damage over time and then it'll take the damage take.

essentially twice as much damage from whatever you're hitting it with, and then again tap it with some other fire. But we never taught that. We just got used to playing that way with certain scenarios. And that game, that was I I actually did not eat pizza for like four years after that because we had you know, a year solid of pizza every night, you know, fourteen hour days, lots of crunch on that.

Jake Simpson (59:46)
Every night.

Big game though. Big game. It was a long one.

Tony Barnes (59:55)
yeah, that was that was another thing. That was my boss Richard Hare, who's the creative director of of the company, creative I guess it's gonna be chief creative officer, whatever. So I would often be like, I'm gonna cut, I'm gonna cut, I'm gonna cut, I'm gonna cut this, I'm gonna cut that, I'm gonna cut that. And he's like, Nope, nope, nope, nope. You can't cut this, because it's integral to this part of the story. You can't cut that, you know, like, cut. And so I would just figure out how to how to make it work. There were a few cuts though. Some of them

Jake Simpson (1:00:24)
Yeah.

Tony Barnes (1:00:27)
Here here here here's a very quick fun fun one. So there was a level that I did not want to touch. Someone else had made it that was long gone from the company and they half asked what they made. And it was just this big giant expanse of nothing, really. It was supposed to be the sunken church. So underground, there's a big church and all this stuff. It was just like, I don't know, get from A to B and fight baddies, right? It and I was like, We're gonna cut this.

it it doesn't make any sense to waste any time on this. So he goes, can't cut it and Fox like you can't cut it, can't do anything. So we all went to go see Lord of the Rings. I dug the, you know, shall not pass thing so much that I went back to work and then I basically hit clear on that level and then I built this giant cave with lava and like a broken staircase and all I built inspired by Lord of the Rings.

And just made a level from that. And then like a day or so later, you know, Fox gets a new build and they had gotten so used to this level just not existing, you know, the testers and all of a sudden the testers get this level and it's completely different. Like I even knew it would be different for them. So I actually had an intro where it slides you and you can't see what it looks like beforehand. It's pointing at Buffy as she slides down a hill and all of a sudden it turns around and it's like this whole fully realized level. And they had

How they flipped the bitch. It was like What? And they said, Well, it was either going to happen or it was gonna get cut, you know? I I had to do something, right? They did not like that, but so be it.

Jake Simpson (1:02:09)
So they were making friends and influencing people, yes.

Tony Barnes (1:02:12)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, publishers are good for that.

Jake Simpson (1:02:16)
So when you were done with the collective, what what what was next? What was happening next after that?

Tony Barnes (1:02:22)
what was that? collective. being told to work on dirty hair he pushed me out. So I ended up going to Rockstar San Diego. Again, a friend was like, Hey, I'm over here. And they have, you know, this cowboy thing that they did Red Dead and they're gonna do a sequel and we can use someone like you. So that's what I went in to interview for. But they ended up putting Red Dead on

on hold for a bit while the engine was being made. So the engine that runs Red Dead is actually the engine that runs GTA four and five and whatever else. So in the interim they said, hey, do you like cars? And yeah, I I'm big on cars. I've lost most cars. I've done a little bit of street racing in my day. And so I ended up working on Midnight Club, which turned to Midnight Club LA. Open world, beacon racing, street racing, car culture, fast, furious, all that fun stuff.

Jake Simpson (1:03:20)
What's a favourite moment from that?

Tony Barnes (1:03:23)
From Rockstar and Yeah. Midnight Club. from Midnight Club. Favorite. I do have a moment that I think is just insane, which was that the game is what I considered over scoped, which would be right scoped for Rockstar, but I wasn't used to that kind of thing. Okay, fair enough.

Jake Simpson (1:03:43)
Yeah they do tend to push the the kitchen.

Tony Barnes (1:03:44)
Yeah, and we had so many things going in there. And I said, you know what, okay, can we just cut pedals? Pedals and shifters. Like do we really need to be you know, customizing that? And they were like, okay, yeah, sure. And then all of a sudden, you know, the housers get on a plane and go back to New York and next thing I know, pedals are back on the schedule. It's just like what is going on? Why why we all agreed that Yeah.

Jake Simpson (1:04:10)
Yeah, we're gonna cut it.

Tony Barnes (1:04:12)
And now we're doing again. Well, they want they they talked about it over the plane and they want them back in. So that that that kind of thing I just was not prepared for that type of development kind of protocol. It's like I'm the kind that like it's like draw a line in the sand and give me a box to work in and I'll work in it and then that's that. You know, not having constant wouldn't it be cool sessions and then just saying

and instead of or. It clearly works for Rockstar, but at that point in my career it was a 180 from anything that I was I was used to.

Jake Simpson (1:04:42)
Mm-hmm.

Right,

so you're a rock star, you work on did you get on Red Dead or not? I mean, did that happen?

Tony Barnes (1:04:56)
No, no. I left before then. I actually ended up having a second set of twins. And

Jake Simpson (1:05:02)
Like I said, but you said the glutton for punishment a bit earlier, but

Tony Barnes (1:05:05)
Rockstar if I were driving fast, forty five minutes away, which I usually kind of drive fast, but that's the kind of driving that eventually something's gonna happen to you, especially some sort of myriad of tickets that I've luckily avoided. So I wanted to be closer. Like I said, I wasn't terribly into the kind of the kind of cadence and protocol that they were doing. And I really as much as I love the nightclub and need for speed also and in any arcade racer I've

kind of like and I wanted to do something smaller. So yeah, I went to work for a little company called Reflexes. Got a lot of exposure to the indie scene, a lot of games that were not AAA or A or any of that, like really ground floor of what the whole the whole indie scene was like and going through that but especially at that point. You know, a lot of match threes and and whatnot. But I also got to meet

talk with a lot of people and see how they approach game making, which is quite different because y you know, their generation looking at the games that I made and deciphering things from the outside. And and they they grow up like today, kids grow up in a world where making games doesn't have this huge stigma and it's not this this niche underground thing. So it's quite interesting to interact with these people. So that was in two thousand seven.

So 2007 to 2008, and everybody knows what happened in 2008. So working for a little company in 2008 wasn't terribly good. They ended up laying a bunch of us off, and then they were bought by Amazon, which subsequently later, company I ended up working for ended up getting bought by Amazon, and we absorbed this company that they that Amazon had who were sort of trying to make games called Reflexive, which was

company that I've worked for. It's a very small, incestuous business. Post reflexive, I went to electronic arts and went back to to EA. That was EA LA. They had a few things go on the go there. They had LMNO, which was with Steven Spielberg. that thing I had an issue with because you could never get a straight answer from any of any of the people working on it or the w especially the leadership. They never had a consistent

you know. They may have they may have had visions, but they had no no way they didn't know what a log line or anything was. They couldn't tell me. I feel like there's a lot of people out there that hate log lines, they hate taglines, they hate the concept of daring to shorten their game down to a a line or three. I personally feel that every game, regardless of how complex it is, or you know, how cerebral or whatever

can still somehow be boiled down. It doesn't have to be X meets Y, but somehow you should be able to tell me what your game is about while we're walking through the hall, passing each other in a conference that and there's people yelling everywhere. Like if you can't do that, how do you expect the player to g get bought in past your screenshot or your trailer or whatever?

Jake Simpson (1:08:21)
That's I agree. And I I see a as an as a derivation of that. I once saw somebody say, if you can't show your game being played on YouTube with no sound, and somebody n if if they can't get what your game is from you watching them play it on YouTube, then you've got a problem in terms of positioning and understanding from the people up there. And I I think your your tagline thing is kind of along those lines.

Like of an understanding of a crystallization of the experience, as it were, what you can expect. And I absolutely buy what you're saying. I absolutely agree with you. I think crystallization. But then I look at The Sims and I'm like, how do you crystallize that a couple of lines? And yet it's a mass massively successful game. And I'm like, I'm not I'm not always sure. I think for the majority of c situations, Tony, I agree with you. And particularly from a pitching point of view, I think you're absolutely right.

But I'm not entirely convinced that all game experiences like Journey is another one. How would you how would you distill Journey into a into a tagline? I don't not sure you could.

Tony Barnes (1:09:27)
And and really it's it's more than taglines are are usually like, you know, razzle dazzle sell the sizzle. It's just can you can you distill it to me? Can you give it to me? You've got ninety seconds. I'll give you a hundred and twenty maybe. Basically the reason it's called an elevator pitch is because it's tell it to me in the time that it takes for us get up to my office before I say yay or nay. To me that's ninety seconds, maybe maybe two minutes at the most of explaining to me.

The reason I think that every every designer should go through the exercise of doing it is also for communication within the team.

Jake Simpson (1:10:07)
Yes, so everyone's rowing in the same direction, isn't it?

Tony Barnes (1:10:09)
Right. So that at at the very least at the top line, I always use the word intent. I say, you know, your intent is very important and your intent is from the top line overview of what you say the game is about all the way down to if it's an FPS like like Medal of Honor, what is your intent for this encounter? For the next five minutes, what is your intent for the player? Right? And so that's that's really where it comes to. And when if I can talk to the leadership of of a team

And I can't find commonality. They don't all have to say the exact same thing. Cause I kinda at this point I really hate that. I hate rehearsed little pillar talks. But if they can't all seem like they're saying the same thing and if they they they all have the same intent, then I'm like, Well, no wonder this game is is and the the reason I brought it up is because I looked at Elm NO and I looked at Tiberium, which was to be their Halo killer.

I looked at Mel of Honor. And the really great thing about Mel of Honor, the Mel of Honor team was they were crisp in their intent. They completely understood where they were in the marketplace. Like they knew they weren't the underdog. They knew they had to be scrappy and fight back to get back into the conversation because Cod had just wiped the floor. I mean, modern warfare is a watershed moment in in first person shooters.

And they had no answer for that. And so I liked that. I like that they they were ready to for a fight. and so it's like, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna go with these guys because they're hungry and they're crisp. It's like the modern day FES, it's not bombastic Michael Bay, it's it's more Blackhawk down. And really that's that's all I need as far as the the pitch or the tag because okay, those things

'Cause you have a history of the game anyway, the franchise and you know the the landscape, I can extrapolate from that, you know, where we're going and then I can tell the team, Okay, this is where we're going, you already know it, so does it fit? It it's very binary, in or out.

Jake Simpson (1:12:23)
Yeah, it allows you to it gives you a shit filter to for for new features and and that kind of stuff. So you worked on the middle of one of them?

Tony Barnes (1:12:31)
Yes. Yeah. That was interesting.

Jake Simpson (1:12:36)
How so?

Tony Barnes (1:12:37)
that's actually where where I first coined this phrase executive fuckery. And yeah, there's a lot of energy spent dealing with executive fuckery on that one. Like I said, the the team the team was great. I'd work with we what do we max out at? we maxed out at like seventy eight people. That was a turning point. Right.

Jake Simpson (1:12:43)
Okay.

Computer for a game of that size.

Tony Barnes (1:13:06)
Yeah, and that's the thing, is like it seems like a lot, especially, you know, Indy and especially now and like solo and all that fun stuff. But it's like we were scrappy for the amount of game that's there and the amount of time that it took, which is about thirty months. Sort of new team, definitely new leadership, sort of new engine, Unreal three point five. And people who have actually worked with Unreal three point anything, know that it is not Unreal Four.

and five that all all that all the kiddies are getting a hold of nowadays. I mean it was it was cool, but the tools were still they they provided some friction. It was interesting keeping people focused on less, like I said, less Michael Bay. Not we're not sitting down watching The Rock or Bad Boys or whatever for our cues. You know, we're watching Black Hawk Down. We're even going back.

you know, even though it was World War Two and stuff with going back and looking at what Melavanor started with. It's like because I wanted it in the DNA. I wanted the organicness and the realities of modern combat to be in the DNA of the designers. I told the designers, Look, you're second unit basically. You're the assistant director on this. So I need you to understand what happens

five minutes before and what's gonna happen five minutes after. You're not just a level designer slapping in stuff and making an encounter here.

Jake Simpson (1:14:35)
Right. It's a whole whole painting, not just a corner of it.

Tony Barnes (1:14:39)
Yeah, and they weren't really used to that and they certainly weren't used to intent. There were a couple of of really good designers that just had never gotten that kind of nudge to do better. One in particular who really helped me was Max Spielberg. He I'll I'll be super honest, I thought, great, this guy's gonna come in who ca 'cause

I mean his last name is it tells you who his lineage is. and the first time that we introduced new team members to the team, I didn't say the names. I said, you know, introduce yourself, you know, and he just said I'm Max and I said, Just Max and he said, Just Max and I said, Okay, that's cool and we talked really solid head on shoulders, really down to earth, like, you know, wanting to put in the work. Yeah, and the thing is is like the things like

Jake Simpson (1:15:30)
Yeah.

Tony Barnes (1:15:34)
end up giving him were things that I wanted us kind of hand things out to the people that that have the proper energy for it. I don't think that people on Teams are just interchangeable batteries. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You'd be surprised at how many times it's like, just have blah blah do it. It's like they're horrible at that. You know? Now all of a sudden I'm gonna think that's a horrible person because he handed them something that they're just horrible at. Instead of handing them

Jake Simpson (1:15:49)
Absolutely agree with you.

Tony Barnes (1:16:02)
You know, the meat they really want to chew on. Max understood gameplay as a narrative force, right? And whether that's in his DNA or not, whatever it it comes out in his game. So his levels were some pivotal story points. Like in the game, we actually have y where y you know, you always have allies with you. You always have two or three other other guys with you. And I said it's important that they each individually have their own consistent

performances. Like there's always the neutral that's near you. There's the one that's like, I don't know, and kind of hanging back. And then there's the gung ho person, you know? And then all of a sudden we take all of that away from you and you're alone. And then the the the level is literally called alone. And it's the first time that you're alone. And because of the consistency in the play and the performance all the way up to that point, a lot of players actually felt it because they weren't it it wasn't like standard kind of gung ho G.I. Joe.

shooter, you're always squad based and all of a sudden you're not. So you're alone, you're hurt, we take away all your weapons, all of these things to give you this feeling. Cause for me, a lot of Medal of Honor through the gun, sure, that's cool. But you can play lots of things to have great through the gun. I mean, there was Modern Warfare too at that point. It was the experience and the feeling that you were getting from playing it. I've gotten a lot of people in the military who have said

Man, that is awesome. There was a a general 'cause it's based on an actual skirmish in a conflict in Afghanistan. And there were a general that actually had his chopper gotten down and he was like, That is totally what it was like. I was sweating

Jake Simpson (1:17:49)
Well I mean you don't can't get much more of a an you know a great review than that, can you really?

Tony Barnes (1:17:54)
It's good. It it's not to say that it's like super like a simulation. No, it's does pull in a lot of psychological strings to help help you have the feeling that you're in war, under fire. And I can't thank Tomo Morowaki. He was assigned as producer, but when quizzed what a producer did versus a development director, I could not find

a reason for there to be a role called the producer. I said, okay, so you're basically someone with a lot of autonomy and no accountability. You're doing a little bit of what a development director does and a little bit of what kind of like I guess a designer might do. I don't know. It it's we're not going to have it. And I said, we're also not going to have EA had a policy at that point. don't know if they still do. Whereas like for every five people, every five heads there would be a manager.

Jake Simpson (1:18:51)
Yeah, I remember running into that.

Tony Barnes (1:18:52)
Yeah, and I was just like, Lord, why do we have all these people? You know what? You, you're working on that level with this person. You, you go together. And that's where kind of the assistant director thing came from with the level designers, you know, was to say, Hey, you manage your world. I will come in and check, but I got a lot of other things checked. So you your world, which means that you also these animations if you need them, these one offs, these these VFX.

You know, all the stuff you guys need. 'Cause at the end of the day, I could do that and I have done that. I've done that on previous projects and I did a lot of it on Medal of Honor. But if you're not handing that kind of responsibility to people, they're never gonna learn how to grow and how to do it, right? And then all of a sudden they get like some field promotion or or they, you know, jump ship and they they get into a position where they're just hopelessly unprepared for what they actually have to do. So instead of

throwing people into cold water and saying swim, I would you know, have the level designers doing work that was above what they were doing. It's better to do the job before you get the job. So they threw

Jake Simpson (1:20:03)
You

can prove you can do it, yeah, exactly. So okay, so we're gonna move this along a bit. So so EA, w you you were there for how long? I mean again, that's your second stint at EA, shall we say?

Tony Barnes (1:20:15)
Yeah. I was at EA for Medal of Honor. Did I r did I mention that thing, executive fuckery? So the powers that be that they brought in, they were not the biggest fans of mine because I I I'm very pragmatic, very frank, and I've been doing this quite some time. So a lot of things like if I see someone stepping on landmine I've already stepped on, I'm going to say no. You know, I'm just gonna say I don't do that.

Right.

Jake Simpson (1:20:46)
Here's some learning for you.

Tony Barnes (1:20:47)
Yeah. And these guys just wanted to do they wanted to do what they wanted to do, without anybody telling them. They wanted to sit around and have wouldn't it be cool sessions, be idea guys and go in schmooz. They didn't want anyone telling them no. They didn't want anyone with as much control over the team as I had. So post twenty ten they brought in people to put above me. And you know what? When you bring in someone above me, that's fine.

Whatever. I'm expecting to learn. I'm expecting this person to be better than me. As a matter of fact, when I hire people, when I interview like people and I tell my designers and the artists and everything, I said, You should be able to kill me in my sleep. Like I want you to be better than me. I'm people that are better than me. Because then that means that we're all going to get better. At least I'll get better. Because if I'm I'm around someone that's not better than me, all I'm going to be doing is spending energy holding things up. But that was not the case.

People are not better than me. But

Jake Simpson (1:21:51)
Been there and done that. I'm There's a there's a phrase, there's a great phrase about like, you know, if you are the smartest man in the room, find another room, right? There's that expression. And I'm keen to point out that that's never really been a problem for me. I've always but and and the thing is though, that it sounds self-deprecating. When I say I'm it sounds I'm being deliberately sort of sh our shucks humble self-deprecating when I'm not. I'm actually saying, no, no, what I've done is I've made sure that there's always smarter people around me because that's the only way you learn. If you're the smartest person in the room.

You aren't learning anything. Other people are, but you won't. And that's why I'm like, yeah, I've always got to find smarter people than I am. And I yeah, sometimes I feel really stupid because, you know, when you're in a in a room with John Carmack and Tom Forsyth and or Chris Butcher or whatever, then yeah, you know, you are gonna feel a bit stupid because these people are so significantly higher than the rest of us. But on the other hand, you know, y you rate you have to raise your game. You just have to. And I think that's it's the important thing.

Tony Barnes (1:22:48)
And that's a h that's seriously, that is a huge part of it. That is the thing. I'm I'm always trying to like say raise my game. I remember I said the morning that I wake up knowing everything is the morning I wake up dead.

Jake Simpson (1:23:03)
Well, you don't wake up, yes. Right, yeah. I understand you see I understand what you're saying. Yeah. The do you know, after Sims Two, after we finished writing doing Sims Two, I thought, my God, there was like two hundred and something people on 170 people on that team. And I thought, I'm gonna go away and I'm gonna write a book. I'm gonna write a book about about working with big teams in the games industry, because it was the biggest team I'd ever worked on at that point. I mean it was dwarfed later on by Godfather, who had two hundred and fifty something people on it.

And I thought, I'm gonna go and write a book. And I started to write this book. And the more I wrote it, the more I realized that the situation we were in was so particular and so specific that half of the lessons I thought I was imparting didn't actually go across, you know, the number of people who'd actually be able to use some of the lessons that I was trying to impart would be so small, you know, the number of other teams that could do 170 people on a team at that time, obviously this is you this is you know, fifteen years ago.

was s so insignificant there'd be a budget, there'd be a a market of about six people for this book. And even then, the most of the the lessons wouldn't really hit particularly for other people. You know, the lessons you'd for a for a Sims product aren't necessarily the same lessons you'd learn for a first person shooter or an RPG or whatever it might be. And I began to realise, yeah, what I knew, I knew a lot, but it was all very particular and very specific. And yeah, it's like I began to realise I thought I knew a lot and then I realised, yeah, I do know a lot, but

it's not appropriate for the wide world, you know, it's this very, very narrow bit here that was appropriate for. So yeah.

Tony Barnes (1:24:34)
You you never know though. Like I I used to kind of think that also, but now I'm realizing that a lot of people end up in similar enough situations or th or you know, people can take your stories or or you know, your wisdom a la carte. That that happens a lot nowadays where someone will go, Okay, well I didn't do X, but I totally know where you're coming from because of Y. Yeah. Okay. So

Jake Simpson (1:25:01)
I did run into that. I did run into that a bit actually when I interviewed Bungie and there was a couple of things that I have explained to them what we did on Sims 2. And I remember Nana Gucci going writing down, going, well that's a good idea. And I remember thinking at the time, thinking, yeah, I've got this this interview zone up. And yeah, I didn't. It's a terrible interview, it's an awful interview. on both our parts, not just them, me as well. But anyway, pro tip, ladies and gentlemen, do not go into an interview at a place like Bungie when you've been out on the piss the night before. Yeah, that's

Tony Barnes (1:25:29)
So

Jake Simpson (1:25:30)
Not good. Anyway, so okay, off three A, where are you next?

Tony Barnes (1:25:36)
sort of back at the collective. Well, there was a stint where I thought I was gonna go indie, but I as much as I knew in my head that other people didn't have any clue you know, my my peers in Triple A ha didn't have a clue on in what the difference between a nice machinery like triple A development was like versus indie development. Thinking in my head, you know, because I did in the eighties, I thought, yeah, I'll I I'll be able to do this. I was not able to do that in

twenty eleven. But I'm in a much better place now. But so I ended up doing some contract work for the collective or double helix. They were working on a couple of games and they had revived the Slayer engine. Slayer engine ran Buffy and Indiana Jones and Wrath and countless games, right? So I'm thinking, okay, that office is fifteen minutes away, cool, you know, I can pick up some Christmas money.

And I'm basically just putting on my old shoes because I know the engine inside and out. I helped architect it. So okay. And they had shown me what they were working on. It was a first person shooter. And it was like, wow, how did you get the engine like you know to do a first person shooter? Impressive. And it wasn't bad. The through the gun was was a little squishy, but it wasn't bad. So I went and did that and the cool shooter they were working on.

Jake Simpson (1:26:49)
Yeah, to to do this.

Tony Barnes (1:27:03)
iced yeah we ended up doing battleship from the movie so it's battleship the movie the game i think that literally is what's on the box and we did that in six months literally like like ink dried go on the slayer engine which is built from doing brawlers and 3d action adventure games and we didn't have a terrain engine so all of these islands were built

I I get on the project day one, all the islands are built and the artist is saying we can't adjust at them at all. They said, Who designed these things? well, we just kind of made islands based on this picture. Great. So I had to pour Yeah. We had to pour an actual game onto a piece of concrete using an engine that was not built for it in in six months without seeing not one cell of the film. That was good times.

But like I said, I I was casual about it 'cause I was like, whatever, you know, this is really just me picking up some Christmas money and all that fun stuff. So the one thing I r begged and pleaded Activision to not sell it at full price. I said, This is at best a twenty four ninety nine game. But really if you want your sweet spot is nineteen ninety nine. If you sell it for that, it will do well. And they're all so you think we'll sell three times as many as we do at at sixty? And I said

The point is like for you, it's a revenue point, but for us, it it's a reputation thing. Like I don't know if you'll sell three times as many, but what I do know is that people will look at the value of a twenty dollar game and go, okay, these guys tried their best and that's cool. Instead, if you sell it at sixty, they'll go, This isn't Call of Duty, which is from the same company because they don't know any better because it's Activision, and they will burn us. They will burn us to the ground. And the the

Jake Simpson (1:28:37)
Mm.

Tony Barnes (1:28:59)
Pradush bag didn't care and it went out at 60 bucks. And I think it's one of my lowest metacritics. I'm not sure. You know, I try not to do those things. It's an okay game with a big giant capital O, especially if you're not paying 60 bucks for it. Anyway, so I'm on my way out the door because contracts up and all this. Studio Head says to me, Hey, have you heard of a little game called Strider? And I said, Yeah, are you kidding?

And he said, No. So we're in talks to get Strider, but I need you to hang around. So they paid me to hang around and I you know worked on Killer Instinct pre production to get the pitch across, which really everybody put in some great work on that. But also James Goddard, who is the co lead on Buffy, he did all the combat lead for Buffy. He was going to be producing it or something at Microsoft.

Right. I mean it was kind of this weird incestuous webs. I mean, I wasn't thinking about working on it anyway, but I wasn't terribly worried that it wasn't going to happen. Maybe, maybe it wouldn't have. I don't know. So slapped together proposal for that. Then proposal for Strider. We get Strider and yay, bucket list item. As a matter of fact, I said to the studio head, I said, You get Strider and it's mine and I will stay here. I will work on it. I will make the greatest game.

that this company has put out. He said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I No, no, no. When I say it's mine, I mean I don't I don't want to be fencing with some executive over nonsense that you want to put in this game that doesn't belong in this game. This is a big deal to me. This

Jake Simpson (1:30:42)
So it's final cuts what you're looking for, baby.

Tony Barnes (1:30:45)
Yeah. And I mean, when I say it's a big deal, it really like I literally have a bucket list, a video game bucket list, and it has a list of stuff that I wanna accomplish in my career. And number three on that list, right above make our type clone, is make strider like game. Right? So you're handing me the keys to Strider and you're gonna let me reboot it. You know I'm gonna put in the work. And you know, I did.

There was there were times there were times. I remember having a conversation with the studio head who really wanted to bait basically turn it into Gears of Strider because he didn't think that Colorful and Camp and Over the Top was gonna sell in today's market. And I'm like, you're you don't understand the license. He's a ninja that wears bright blue and red and he screams every time he swings a sword. His

s and he swings a sport and it's only one frame and it slices guys in half. He he he fights a giant mecha gorilla after running away from wolves down a ski slope. Like he you know, it's like there's nothing

Jake Simpson (1:31:58)
You're not gonna make that gritty, no, I get it.

Tony Barnes (1:32:01)
And then finally I said, You know what? You're gonna hate this game. You're gonna hate this game, but you're gonna love what it does for the studio. So just let me do my thing. And to this day, Strider's probably, you know, it's one of my top five games I've made. I

Jake Simpson (1:32:17)
That's always a good thing, isn't it? I mean, having that kind of experience and having I mean, I don't know, professional pride in something you look back on. I don't think it can be undervalued. That feeling of satisfaction, that feeling of, yeah, no, it was worth it. I'm proud of this. I will put this up against other things. There is nothing like that, I think, in and I mean it's not particular to our our industry. Certainly, you know, people, writers have it and and people in the entertainment industry always have it. Even, you know, car designers have it.

But yeah, I think it is a weird thing in that you can be so proud of something you've done and yeah. I feel a way about any of the games I've worked on.

Tony Barnes (1:32:57)
I feel like you need at least one of those, if not a few of those. You know, you need you need

Jake Simpson (1:33:02)
Keep to keep you rolling later on in life. Absolutely. Yeah. And that also the belief that there's the best is yet to come as well. I've I'm firmly of the belief that there is always something cool over the over the horizon. There's always something I haven't peeked yet, there's more stuff to do. I'm firmly of that belief. Because otherwise, as you say, you know, you're just not gonna get up in the morning. It's

Tony Barnes (1:33:23)
Right. Yeah, I mean now I I have my own company, everything and a lot of the games I've made where I look back and I go, I wish I had done X or Y I just figured now I can do X or Y, you know, because there's no one that's going to stop me. Of course what I also have to pay attention to is when I didn't get to do or was told to do some other thing and it worked out, you know, that kind of

self reflection, self awareness is it it's tough but you have to have it, especially if you're independent, you become the boss.

Jake Simpson (1:34:00)
Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about there. I know exactly what you mean in in terms of learning you don't know it all. Learning that you are you that there is stuff that you don't know and that there's sometimes there's things that are unknowable and and things that are unpredictable. The the hardest lesson I've ever learned was you can do it all right and still fail anyway. You know, and and that sucks because there's nothing you can do about that. There's nothing you could have done about that. There's no no magic ball that's gonna be able to tell you what to do. And and that sucks a bit. Learning that is a hard lesson, I think.

Tony Barnes (1:34:30)
so we ended up getting bought by Amazon because we did really cool stuff in a short amount of time. At first I thought it would be great to be getting paid at a retirement home, which is kinda like, you know, one of these big companies that doesn't have a sense of urgency and all this kind of stuff.

Jake Simpson (1:34:47)
You never need to worry about your paycheck being made, that's for sure.

Tony Barnes (1:34:50)
Yeah.

And it's and to be honest, it's no slight. I'm I actually am only half joking when I said it. I really did, you know, wanna kinda slow down and see what it was like to to be in that situation. And then I found out that it made me very itchy and I didn't like it. And I've always joked well, i there's there's several jokes about me. One, my wife says I should come out. What she means is like I should come out as black because nobody knows I'm black really. And I've been doing this for like a million years.

and so there's kind of this perception that there aren't any black video game designers or video game developers in general. And so it's like, okay, I should I should probably like put myself out there when you you know, and like let people know. Yeah, as the kids say hashtag representation matters. So I I

Jake Simpson (1:35:28)
Celebrated a bit, as it were.

I'm gonna interrupt you just second and say, I've often said and you see me say this on Twitter and things like that, that I love me a bit of Tony Barnes. And I do, I love me a bit of Tony, because I've I have so much respect for the fact that you've always stood up for your own your own shit. You've always stood up and even when it's cost you, you've always said your piece. And I really I respect the hell out of that. But I also look at you as an inspirational individual. You are you're an aspirational individual is what you are. And and that's why I was so keen to get you on this, is because I do consider you to be such an aspirational person.

Not just because you're black or whatever, but just because you are you just keep going. You don't stop. You're always you're like this machine that's growing through the world. And there's a lot to be learned. There's a lot. You have so much experience. You've got so much to offer. And the fact that yeah, maybe you are black is aspir is aspirational to other other kids that aren't seeing, you know, representation or whatever. But I am in awe of your career and things you've done. And I just you know, round of applause, frankly.

Tony Barnes (1:36:34)
you, thank you. And I I mean to to circle back, that is actually I want urban youth to to look and and go, that is a possibility, right? But I also always say to that I think it's important in this business where someone says, I've been doing this five years, it's so hard, I quit or I've been doing this ten years and I'm a vet and they think that they they know everything, yeah. Yeah, they act as if they, you know, had fought along, you know, in in World War One or something. And it's like

No offense to ten years, but it's ten years like is right when you start to get the feel and especially nowadays where games take so much longer and the teams are so much larger and all this if you're in in a a bigger place. So I look and I go, I want people to understand that there's longevity in this business, that there's quote, old timers, but we're viable, you know, just just because I'm I'm now fifty doesn't

mean I don't play games and I don't understand games and I don't as a matter of fact, look to the older generation, look at to the veterans, the the mentors, and actually learn from them. Because what happens in this biz is so many people come in and then a lot of the the actual, you know, the people that have the experience leave. They're like, I'm done, I'm burnt, whatever. And they go. And there's a there's a brain drain that happens. And

So all of a sudden the new generation comes in, they have to learn all over again, all of the mistakes and everything. And I'm just like, my God, you know what? I'm gonna put myself out there so that people can know that you can be in this business and you can still be in it and you don't have to you you can do all kinds of things. So

Jake Simpson (1:38:24)
A lot of possibilities face.

Tony Barnes (1:38:25)
Yeah. I and seriously, like especially now because there's so many generations of people that have grown up on video games. So my company, Retro Ninja

Jake Simpson (1:38:36)
Which by the way is an awesome name.

Tony Barnes (1:38:38)
thank you. It's brand, which I'm I've been kind of firming up over the past two years. Like I started it going, yeah, I like what was it? Old school old school flavor with new school cooking, I think was like some phrase I came up with. yeah. clearly I love it because I couldn't really w couldn't do the yeah and sell it. So but the point is that I

Jake Simpson (1:38:56)
Tagline, right?

Tony Barnes (1:39:05)
kind of like with Strider and I really like Killer Instinct and stuff. I like certain types of games, older, I guess arcade games and all that stuff, but I'm not so strict that it's like I, you know, I have to make it exactly the way it was, or and because I made those games back then, it's in my DNA. So I know how to pull to feel. Strider's a prime example of how you remember Strider, not how Strider really was.

Jake Simpson (1:39:32)
Nostalgia filter, so to speak, but not necessarily yeah, I understand where you're coming from. I

Tony Barnes (1:39:34)
Yeah.

And and I'll put Strider alongside Doom twenty sixteen in that camp of games that

Jake Simpson (1:39:44)
What is modern or bottom but

Tony Barnes (1:39:47)
But they make you feel the way you felt back then, right? And I thought, you know what, someone building stuff like that could probably build a pretty decent business. Mm-hmm.

Jake Simpson (1:39:59)
business does but so yeah right but yeah, I absolutely agree.

Tony Barnes (1:40:03)
Yeah, one of the other joke kind of things was, what was it? See I'm the biggest thing you've never heard of.

Jake Simpson (1:40:11)
That's kind of where this this podcast is all about. I mean, it's called Game Dev Unsung Heroes. And it's all about the people who've had careers, that have been around a while, that have done a lot of things that, you know, nobody's ever heard of. I mean nobody really has ever heard of me either. And, you know, I've been around for quite some time and worked on some very good product too. So And that's okay. It's not about it's not about r name recognition necessarily, but it's about a celebration of those people who've been around for ages and and have contributed significantly to the gaming industry. Like

I a a gaming industry without Tony Vonds in it would not actually look the same as it does now. It just wouldn't. And it's the same for all the other people that that I've I've talked to. And yet, you know, nobody no not nobody has a clue who you are, but you know what I'm saying. You're not Cliff B recognition or or or Tim Sweeney or whatever. And you know, Tim's only really that recognizable because he's busy suing the crap out of Apple.

Tony Barnes (1:40:52)
I know.

No, I understand exactly what you're saying. And like the other thing was I would often joke and say, I should be on my third failed company by now. Yeah. So I was like, okay, you know what? This is it. This is there's no better time. And I've actually said this to countless people over the past year or so, is that there's no better time to be making games. Like there's many avenues in. There's a huge, wide arrain of jobs. So you don't have to be

Jake Simpson (1:41:08)
Yeah.

Tony Barnes (1:41:30)
the sous chef, you don't have to be the person that can do a million things. You know, you can be very focused on what you do and do it really well. Or you can be, you know, the jack of all traits. And there's distribution. Sure, there's a lot of noise out there, but you know, there's ways to to break through it. And I mean, the engines you can get for free now are insane. I can't even imagine what my life would have been like if I had had access to

Any engine that started with a U. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (1:42:02)
Exactly what you're saying. Yeah, the barrier to entry in the learning curve is much shorter than it used to be. We used to have to wait a year to have technology before you could start building a game. Now you could start building a game that afternoon.

Tony Barnes (1:42:12)
Yeah. And then for better or for worse, gamers are it's just weird stratification. They're they want things super tight, super polished, no problems whatsoever from a certain segment, but then from another segment they're practicing extreme jank. They just love things that are what I would consider broken prototypes and toys, but don't get up to death. I mean, come on, Roblox, Rec Room, those things are ha what's the valuation on those companies? And yet so I I scoff at nothing.

I look at it all as opportunity. And so there's no better time. So I said, okay, this is it. And the whole retro ninja and the retro ninja brand is build games that have the DNA or make you remember and feel the way you did when you were playing games in say the eight or nineties and you know, when I'm doing this ten years from now, I'll do some two thousandy type games, whatever. But it's like all of that in the soul of the game and then

it has a nice nifty new coat of paint so that people that like modern can can play it. So I have a game that's going to be coming out soon soon as you know, a month or so called BPM Boy. And basically my wife loves Marvel Madness, my dearly departed mother, one of her favorite games with Marble Madness and Crystal Castles. These are isometric maze game type things, right?

And I just said, I want to embody that. I want Marble Madness and Super Monkey Boy and Crystal Castles and you know, I I I want these games to all just be oozing out of this thing. So I just sat down and said, Okay, let's get a ball rolling. Let's get a f let's let's make a roller. And you know, there's millions of rollers out there. Hopefully someone will see what is unique and interesting about BPM Boy. I just wanted to do it. And what's great is I I can.

And it's now this thing that everyone that sees it, they give me nothing but praise, which is really cool because you know, you work in a silo and you don't know. that's true. And the people who have played it, they said, yeah, you wouldn't even have to mention to me your influences. Like it there it's oozing out of every pore. Yeah, I can I can feel the moral menace. I can tell the day that you played Sonic Adventure and you know, it's like

And I'm fine with that because that's Retro Ninja's brand is to take all of these things and synthesize them and to give you the feeling that you had when you were playing those games, but it's in a new game. Down to the in BPM Boy, even down to the music. The music is I make lots of music and I've done music in my games too, like half the music in Buffy is done by me, all that fun stuff. Yeah. You know, on my own I tend to make dr drum and bass, industrial.

Jake Simpson (1:45:00)
That's interesting. yeah.

Tony Barnes (1:45:08)
stuff like that, you know, kind of nine inch nails sounding stuff and all that. But I also huge influences in my life in general was Prince, the police, Miles Davis, Chick Korea, you know, lots of jazz and jazz fusion and funk. And so it's been thirty years probably since I've done that kind of music. And so I said, you know what? So when BPM Boy went from it literally was called just roller, but when it went from roller

to becoming BPM boy was when I decided I'm going to just absorb all of that nineties house funk kind of jazzy stuff. And so it again, it just helps permeate the entire thing. But that's one of the things I'm doing right now. Doing some other stuff like a first person platformer. And I am also working on sort of a strike, I don't know what to call it. yeah, I guess.

Jake Simpson (1:46:03)
College.

Tony Barnes (1:46:05)
But I mean it's probably a little more than yeah, maybe it's just more homage than spiritual successor. Because like you know, everybody always talks about future strike. And I always wanted to do a sci-fi, you know, isometric shooter. So it's top down at sci-fi, but it's also co-op, which a strike game has never been. So and it's called Chaos Chassis. And so it's a split screen co op.

Jake Simpson (1:46:08)
Spiritual successor.

Tony Barnes (1:46:35)
top down open ended shmup, you know, like strike is it's a whole ball of crazy. And because I love games like Destiny and Helldivers, it's kinda like that where it's like pick a planet, start a mission, approach it from whatever angle you want and

Jake Simpson (1:46:52)
Emerging gameplay kind of stuff.

Tony Barnes (1:46:53)
Yeah. Those are the things that are on the go for Retro Ninja and Tony Barnes. And I have vowed that at least two of them will get out this year.

Jake Simpson (1:47:06)
Well, I'm gonna call it right now. We're we're at two hours, so yeah, it's all right, no, it's good, it's all good. I wanna say thank you very much, Tony, for spending the time with me and talking about your career. It's been it really edifying and interesting and I'm so glad I got to got to spend this time with you.

Tony Barnes (1:47:22)
no, it's been awesome. Thank you for asking. It really helps. Let you know, let me babble for a while.

Jake Simpson (1:47:24)
You're more than welcome, sir.

It's it's yeah, I know exactly how you feel.