Forty Years and a Hundred Games In, Tony Barnes Made an Arcade Shooter on His Own
A veteran of EA, Crystal Dynamics and Rockstar has released his first solo game in over three decades. It is a vector arcade shooter that owes everything to 1981.
Tony Barnes has been making games for forty years and has more than a hundred shipped titles behind him, with credits at Electronic Arts, Crystal Dynamics, Rockstar Games and The Collective. Today he released VectaGuard, his first independently developed game in more than three decades, and the debut title from his own studio, RetroNinja Games. It is out now on Steam for Windows and Steam Deck.
It is an arcade shooter, and Barnes is refreshingly unembarrassed about where it comes from. The stated influences are Gravitar, Caverns of Mars and Defender, which is to say 1981 and 1982, the Atari coin-op and 8-bit era, back when a game was a loop you either mastered or did not. VectaGuard renders that in 2.5D vector graphics with modern lighting, physics and particle work, and builds the usual modern scaffolding around it: stackable weapon upgrades that reward experimenting with builds, global cross-platform leaderboards, full controller support, and a dynamic electronic soundtrack.
“The games that inspired me as a kid were simple pure gameplay,” Barnes said. “Easy to learn, hard to master, impossible to put down. After decades of working with incredible teams, creating solo again has been incredibly rewarding, and VectaGuard is the product of that. It’s my tribute to the games that made me want to become a developer to begin with.”
RetroNinja Games launches with it, described as a studio built to make modern games with the DNA of the golden age. VectaGuard is its first release.
I have not played it, so this is not a verdict. But the shape of the thing is worth noting on its own. The score-chasing arcade game is the format the industry walked away from most completely, because there is nothing to sell you at the end of a run and no story to put in a trailer. It survives now mostly as nostalgia, or as a mode buried in something bigger. So a developer with a hundred games and four decades of other people’s deadlines behind him, choosing to sit down alone and build a vector shooter about getting good at one loop, is a small and specific vote for what he thinks the medium got right the first time.
That is the version of retro POCG cares about. Not a filter over a modern game, but somebody going back to the actual design problem and working on it again.