We spoke to top Buffy author Christopher Golden back when he'd just started work on scripting the Buffy Xbox game, then caught up with him again a few months ago for some more questions. Here's what he told us about the process.
Tell us about the work you and Tom Sniegoski have done on scripting the Buffy game.
Tom and I are still in the process of writing the dialogue for the Buffy video game for the Microsoft Xbox, 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.
What have been the challenges of scripting for a game?
When I got the story outline, there were a couple of things we knew you couldn’t do unless you explain them, because they don’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 interesting. It’s 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.
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 we’ve actually done all the cut scenes. They’re like scenes from the show.
What's your impression of the game now you've seen it?
I’ve seen a very early version and I must say, I can’t wait to play this game. It looks really cool.
The gameplay is good, and all the voices, save Sarah’s, are the actual actors. And the girl who does Sarah’s voice sounds exactly like her. They got a great voice double.
There are lots of cut-scenes. It’s why they hired us, because they knew that they needed a story, they knew that they needed to make it feel like Buffy. It’s very like putting yourself in the longest episode of Buffy ever done.
There’s plenty of fighting, but you really do need to understand the plot of the game, and figure out as you go along, what they’re really up to. The hard thing was figuring out how much of the cut-scenes they could remove, because some were very long.
Do you think this game will lead to others?
There’s always talk. There is going to be another Buffy game, but I can’t really tell you any more about it. You can say there’s going to be a second one. We’re in preliminary stages of working on the story for that one.
Back to the main Buffy Xbox game feature page.
