We heard recently that you Tom Sniegoski had scripted the Buffy console game…
Tom and I are still in the process of writing the dialogue for the Buffy video game for the Microsoft X-Box which is really cool. The one hint that I’ve been giving - even if I don’t know if Fox is going to yell at me or not - is that you do get to see the return of a major Buffy villain.
Is this like a fresh take on the game, because there was a lot of talk about it a while back, before everything went quiet for months?
Well, we’ve only been brought in over the last few months, so I don’t know what was done before and how it may have changed.
When I got the story outline, there were a couple of things we knew you couldn’t do unless you explain them, because that doesn’t work in the Buffyverse.
You can’t have that vampire behave this way because vampires don’t do that, so you have to say why that particular vampire is capable of doing that. So, that was kind of interesting. It’s just been funny and working with Tom is always a blast. The more I work with him, the less I’m able to figure out who wrote what.
Most of the crazy lines - the nonsensical lines - are his, but not all. Once upon a time, they would all have been his, but he’s been influencing me I think. He’s so funny and so there are some hysterical scenes that turn on one line in the dialogue.
Is it tricky to script a computer game? Are you guiding people to a certain conclusion or are you having to write for many possible outcomes?
The game has a great deal of both combat scenes and static scenes - which are called cut scenes in the jargon of the industry - and so we’ve actually done all the cut scenes. They’re like scenes from the show.
