Xbox Games Showcase Deep Dive | Invincible VS

SPEAKER 1: Games in this podcast range from E to M.

MALIK PRINCE: What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the official Xbox podcast, the only podcast coming to you from inside Xbox. I'm Malik Prince and joined with Jenn Panattoni. Jen, how's it going?

SPEAKER 2: They thought they could do this episode without me? I will burn this podcast down before I spend another minute living among these animals.

JENN PANATTONI: Malik, what did you do? Why is Omni-Man here?

MALIK PRINCE: I don't know. I don't know how he got here. I don't know. We can't mess this up now.

JENN PANATTONI: We? Yeah, of course not. No, we can't, so why don't you go ahead and introduce our guests?

MALIK PRINCE: All right. Good call. Well, today we are hyped up to talk about Invincible vs., and joining us to walk us through everything is, of course, Chris Paulson, who is the Executive Vice President and General Manager at Skybound Games, and Mike Willette, who is Executive Producer of Invincible VS. Chris, Mike, thank you so much for joining us here today.

MIKE WILLETTE: Thanks for having us, but we're going to let Cecil know that you've betrayed the Earth.

MALIK PRINCE: Oh, my God.

JENN PANATTONI: Oh, God, you screwed up.

MALIK PRINCE: All the pressure is back.

JENN PANATTONI: Yeah, it was gone, and now it's not.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, I know. I know.

JENN PANATTONI: Now it's tenfold. So Chris, just jumping right in here, tell us about yourself and tell us what you do at Skybound Games.

CHRIS PAULSON: Great. Yeah, I have the honor of leading the Skybound Games team, which is responsible for bringing all of Skybound's great IPs to life in games, and the first game we're going to talk about, Invincible VS, is the big launch we have next year.

JENN PANATTONI: Excellent, and Mike, you are the EP on the game. I'm going to go ahead and assume you love fighting games. Tell us about yourself, and then tell us what the team's up to.

MIKE WILLETTE: Oh, God, I absolutely love fighting games. Some of you may have remembered me from Killer Instinct, like, over a decade. It's a decade.

JENN PANATTONI: Oh, wow.

MIKE WILLETTE: So had the itch, needed to get back into fighting games, got a lot of passionate people with me, and we want to deliver the most awesome Invincible tag battle fighting game you've ever played.

JENN PANATTONI: I love that.

MALIK PRINCE: And I think you're well on your way to doing that. Now, Invincible, an IP that started as a comic book and now is a show on Amazon Prime, something that I've been catching up on. We were joking earlier that I was watching it on the plane, and it's a little bit of an interesting show to watch on a plane, a little brutal for the plane. I had to put it on pause and watch it.

CHRIS PAULSON: Some moments.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, so --

JENN PANATTONI: Got to put some blinders around your stuff?

MALIK PRINCE: Exactly, exactly, but it was so much fun. So why did you all decide to go the fighting game route to bring Invincible into gaming?

MIKE WILLETTE: When I first got this opportunity, just looking at the landscape, there hadn't been an awesome tag battle fighting game for a while. There hasn't been a Marvel title. There hadn't been a Dragon Ball FighterZ title, and I'm like, oh, this is a really underserved portion of the FGC, fighting game community that I really wanted to embrace. And then looking at Invincible as an IP, I was like, holy shit. The battles that they have and the hype moments, I'm like, I want to translate that on screen, where people can just pick their favorite fighters and whatever combination and have these awesome, brutal superhero fights with tons of collateral damage and the stakes that you would get from the show. I kind of started there, like let's build a badass fighting game.

CHRIS PAULSON: I think Invincible is perfect for a fighting game because there are hundreds of characters.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah.

CHRIS PAULSON: They're all unique. They all have incredible superhero skills and crazy, crazy, zany stuff and brutal stuff happens.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, in watching the show, every time they would introduce a new character, and you would see their powers, it almost, to your point, made itself perfect to make a fighting game because you can just go wild with the possibilities of how each competitor can take on each other, so it was just cool to see.

JENN PANATTONI: All right. So we are going to run the trailer here, and so you two are going to walk us through what we are seeing and experiencing. You ready for it?

CHRIS PAULSON: Oh, yeah.

MIKE WILLETTE: Let's do it.

JENN PANATTONI: All right. Let's do it.

CHRIS PAULSON: So you're going to start hearing banter over the radio. Easter egg here. One of them is our commentator friend and now combat designer, Rip.

MALIK PRINCE: This guy looks a lot like a guy I know.

CHRIS PAULSON: He does look familiar.

MALIK PRINCE: He looks like someone I know.

JENN PANATTONI: He looks like someone I -- oh, my God.

CHRIS PAULSON: Definitely lost his head on that. He's not in traffic anymore.

JENN PANATTONI: Yeah, ha-ha, ha-ha, technically correct.

CHRIS PAULSON: What we wanted to demonstrate here is the scope and scale of superhero battles, and you can see a lot of that throughout this scene. And you see it in our Chicago arena, as well.

MIKE WILLETTE: Yeah, and that really mirrors something we saw on the show where, of course, Omni-Man and Invincible were fighting, and literally, Omni-Man just threw Invincible through, cars, trains, and everything. It's very cool.

JENN PANATTONI: And the consequences of it, to your point.

MIKE WILLETTE: It's the stakes of superheroes just battling and the sense of speed. And look at the battle damage and the blood where -- all things that are reflected in the game.

CHRIS PAULSON: And when superheroes fight, buildings collapse, people die.

JENN PANATTONI: Cars thrown. This is wild. All right. So talk me through. So you see the three here on one side. Talk us through this.

MIKE WILLETTE: This is our nod to, hey, this is tag battle fighting, and what you see in here, in some of the attacks, in Zula's braid attack, they're inspired by or directly from the things that we're doing in the game.

SPEAKER 3: I'm not your son anymore.

CHRIS PAULSON: So we see the face-off here.

MIKE WILLETTE: And we're trying to tell the whole Invincible story in two minutes to introduce people. Lots of people will be learning about Invincible for the first time through the trailer and seeing Mark's relationship with his dad and superheroes fighting it out to the death.

JENN PANATTONI: Probably quite the challenge, but I feel like you're doing a really good job. You're landing so many -- you have this huge universe of things, and you literally have two minutes to land this, and that it's a tag 3v3 game.

CHRIS PAULSON: And just showcasing some of the fluidity of our combo system, how you're tagging in characters, going from special moves to super moves and active tags, and then show all the blood and the violence.

MIKE WILLETTE: You're getting a few sneak peeks of some environments that you'll be able to experience in the game all around the Earth.

CHRIS PAULSON: And some of our combo mechanics, and then, ultimately, into our Ultimate moves.

MIKE WILLETTE: All the things that the fighting game community is looking for in a fighting game I feel like are represented so well in this trailer.

SPEAKER 4: I see it all now.

MIKE WILLETTE: And this is a mix of Eve and Mark's Ultimates, which are devastating.

JENN PANATTONI: Oh, her head is gone.

MIKE WILLETTE: As we say, if it can kill, it will kill.

CHRIS PAULSON: Yeah.

MIKE WILLETTE: Coming 2026.

MALIK PRINCE: 2026, love that.

JENN PANATTONI: 2026.

MALIK PRINCE: Now, I know you all are working. We saw some of the animations there, which were incredible. I know you all are working with Robert Kirkman and the Skybound Animation Studio to make this, right? What's that been like to work so closely on a series that, one, is obviously well known for their animations, but two, putting it into a video game. What's that been like?

MIKE WILLETTE: Awesome in a word, but, I mean, you get unprecedented access to things. Whether it's the creators or the animation team, or just decades worth of just comics and reference. So when we build out characters, when we go through the design process, we're mapping out moves and archetypes. We're, oh, who would be really cool in the roster, and what would their move sets be? And then you have all this reference from the show and from the comics and the poses they'd hit. And then you can pull in new things that you find. And you're like, oh, would that fit them, their personality? And you have these conversations, and just, it creates that. It's really awesome to play and what it feels like just to get all that personality loaded into -- whether it's an idol or an attack or a taunt or an intro, it's all there, and we have access to all those resources.

CHRIS PAULSON: Yeah, Skybound is super unique because we have editorial, filming, TV, video games all under the same roof. So we have a comic book team -- the creators of the comic, we're playing the game with them.

JENN PANATTONI: Nice.

CHRIS PAULSON: And the animation team and the creative team behind the show. Is part of the team making the game. It's a special experience that I haven't had anywhere else. It's really cool.

JENN PANATTONI: What is it like actually playing with the people who made the comic? Because they -- obviously, they have a lot of experience and a lot of familiarity, and then you are bringing it to life in a fighting game. What's it like for them?

MIKE WILLETTE: It's surreal. I mean, at first, it's like completely surreal, like oh, my God, I read your comic some time last week. And then you get to play with them, and then you understand they're creators, and they want everything to be just as awesome as you do, and you look at everything kind of in a similar light. You're, oh, wouldn't that be cool? "Oh, yeah, that would be cool." And so, you have these conversations, and then it's so awesome to kick their ass in a fighting game really --

JENN PANATTONI: With their own characters.

MIKE WILLETTE: I'm beating you with something you made. How awesome is that?

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, but I mean, beyond that, I mean, video games for solo, it's always been movie, TV shows, even comic books, and video games allows you to kind of bring these characters to life in new and different ways. So just to -- I can only imagine what it must be like for them. But obviously, we just saw the trailer, but let's just jump into some gameplay and talk over it.

MIKE WILLETTE: Absolutely.

CHRIS PAULSON: All right.

JENN PANATTONI: All right, let's roll that first batch. What do we got?

MIKE WILLETTE: We've got Atom Eve and Bulletproof Thula versus Thula, our man Mark, Invincible and Atom Eve.

CHRIS PAULSON: Got the opening animations. Love this.

MIKE WILLETTE: So every character has specific intros and responses to every single character in the cast. So it doesn't matter who's on point. They'll have an interaction. We really wanted to get as much lore and personality in these interactions. So even during tags, or assists, or clash moments, you get these opportunities to just showcase personality.

SPEAKER 5: Whoa.

CHRIS PAULSON: Right here in these matches, you're seeing a lot of what we call active tagging and calling in of assists. So in our combo structure, it uses a magic chain where you can go from light, medium, to heavy attacks. Which can then be canceled into, like, launchers to take you into the air or into Special Attacks and then into Super Attacks.

SPEAKER 6: I've got you covered.

SPEAKER 7: Here we go.

MIKE WILLETTE: What we just saw there from Mark is a Boosted Special Attack, and when you use your Heroic Boost, which is a new meter that we brought. It's individual for each character. When you use that Heroic Boost, it amplifies your Special Moves and gives them different properties. Where like, oh, this attack used to do a hard knockdown. But when I do the Heroic Boosted version, it now causes a ground bounce, or maybe even a wall bounce, which allows me to extend my combo. And so that's a key thing with our system is figuring out where the combo extensions are and then tagging into those situations. So I can at any point when I'm actively comboing something/someone, I can do an active tag, which brings in my teammate to continue the combo. What's key with that is we have something called a Combo Meter, and as you see the hits start to tally up, there will be a bar underneath those hits. It starts filling up, and when it hits maximum, your opponent will fall out of the combo. So there's ways to work around that system by, oh, I active tag, and it reduces that by a little amount, so it allows me to get in more hits, and so, I can do super moves that have no cost to the combo meter. So I try to work my way through a combo. How many times can I get a tag in, Active tag, Super Special before that whole thing blows out, and that's part of like this overall meta, but as a defender, you're not falling victim to watching a slideshow of just like, oh, I'm getting my ass whipped for 60 seconds. You have lots of opportunities during that combo structure to break out. One of those is with your partners. So as long as your partners are alive and you have at least, we'll call it 60%, two of the big blocks of Heroic Boost. If you have two of those, you can actually get out of a combo with your assist. We call it an Assist Breaker. So you hold down your boost, your Heroic Boost, and you just tap whichever assist character is available. They'll come in and break up the combo, and we saw that during this demonstration. Now if you're all out of partners, the only way you can get out of a combo is during an active tag. So you would hit your medium and heavy attack during the active tag portion. So you try to time it to where you flash blue as they're making contact with you, and you can get out. Now, there's other ways around that. That'll take us a little bit more time to get into, but it turns into like a bunch of RPS interactions that make you kind of focused on the combos. You're no longer passively watching. You're actively engaged into the combat and the combo system.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah.

CHRISTINA WARREN: So for us, it was a bunch of evolution and things that we learned from like a decade ago because there's a good portion of us that worked on K.I. But things that we wanted to take and to continue to build off of as we approached a tag battle fighting game.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, and I think when we were playing, I think one of the things to point out is like how approachable it was to pick up. But then, as you're explaining it, the fighting game community, they are going to like love how deep you can go and some of the chains that you could put together. I will say, in watching a lot of this gameplay, there are so many things to note. I mean, we've seen several beheadings at this point.

JENN PANATTONI: Missing limbs.

MALIK PRINCE: Several people did lose their heads.

CHRIS PAULSON: There's so much stuff that goes on in one of these matches because a lot of the things that you see, like, if a move can kill, it kills. You don't stop the action. It keeps going, and people coming in are going to be pissed. They're going to be yelling during those clash moments of what the hell did you just do? You're effing dead. They're ready to get it on, and so special moves, super moves, ultimate moves, if they kill, they will kill to different effect, but it's really to demonstrate the stakes of when superheroes fight. It's not like normal people.

MALIK PRINCE: It's not pretty.

CHRIS PAULSON: It's -- no, it's not pretty at all. The amount of damage that they can do, they're just tearing up the ground underneath you and just what they do to their opponents, as well.

JENN PANATTONI: That was something I thought was super fascinating. So when we were playing earlier, I mean, it was fascinating just to learn how involved -- you have so many options and so many different things you can do to play. You can do a ton of combos if you're really good at that, which I was still learning, so I was not, but as you're playing the game, there's actually ways you can interact with the environment, and there are things around you, if you do something devastating, the actual background will also, become devastated as well. So it was really fascinating to see that interaction, but this game is incredible.

MIKE WILLETTE: Yeah, we really want to have the experience of playing in the Invincible universe. There's real consequences of superheroes going after each other, knocked down buildings.

JENN PANATTONI: And the dude in traffic lost his head.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, and that's something that we kind of saw in parts of the show, when Omni-Man and Mark were fighting. They were going at it, and I'm pretty sure Omni-Man threw Mark through multiple buildings, through traffic, through trains, I'm pretty sure, in -- I saw one of the episodes. And so to see that represented in the game is really cool. And to your point, Jen, in the Chicago setting that we saw a little bit earlier, the map didn't end the same way it started. We had a whole bunch of destruction around it. And that was a lot based off of what you were saying, Mike, around your partners coming in and being mad that you were killing their partners.

CHRIS PAULSON: Yeah, so we want to use the game to introduce Invincible fans to fighting games and fighting game fans to Invincible. We are aiming to make it easy to learn but really hard to master at a professional level. This is going to be a tournament quality fighting game.

JENN PANATTONI: I enjoyed even watching it because there's so much going on. So you can be just as much of a spectator sport as it is a fighting game.

CHRIS PAULSON: Yeah, that's right. We think this is going to be a great game to play and to watch.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, and a lot of that builds on the fact that you-all decided to make this a 3v3 fighter. So as we're looking at this, what was the reasoning for you all going that route versus a 1v1 or 2v2 fighter?

MIKE WILLETTE: I like the strategic depth, but I always like the hype that comes out of 3v3, and just the big moments and just being able to do ridiculous shit, for lack of a better word. You get to combine all these different characters into a kit, and they each have different moves and different alts and just different things that you can combine. So the types of strategy that you can get out of mixing and matching different characters, it's just awesome, and it just gives you like the sandbox to just do whatever in combat. And it's just much more loose than you would get out of like a solo fighter, as far as like, they're very specific routes, a little bit more technical when it comes to defense, but here we wanted to really make it more open, and it is still driven by offense. And you have unique defensive options to where you're not watching the slideshow. You can still actively participate, but it's really, again, about hype and just creating order out of chaos, in a way.

MALIK PRINCE: It's going to be so exciting to see the team comps that people come up with when they actually get into the game. And to your point of whether you pick someone who can throw projectiles, or whether you pick a heavy striker and stuff like that, it's going to be really cool to see how they combine the players of the game to make their ultimate team, essentially.

MIKE WILLETTE: One thing I wanted to just jump right back on, because we talked about, yes, we are making a tournament grade game, for sure, but we wanted to have accessibility for people. Like, this could be your first fighting game, and I'd love for it to be your first fighting game. So we've introduced an auto combo system that works on the ground. It works in the air. It teaches you fundamentally how things should work, going from your basic combo chains into learning how to do magic chains, right? So we want to give you the stepping stones where, if you do the auto combo, it'll do the full chain into a Special, and if you have meter, into a Super Attack. And then you can learn how to do active tags, and then, all of a sudden, it starts building off of itself, but immediately, we want you to pick up the stick, or gamepad, and feel like a badass.

MALIK PRINCE: It'll be awesome, right from the beginning.

JENN PANATTONI: To me, it's an art form. It's an absolute art form. All right. So as we all know, fighting games have an incredibly passionate fan base and so does Invincible, right? So how do you balance that? And what do you think they should know about quarter up, and what y'all are doing over there?

CHRIS PAULSON: First of all, we're making this game for the FGC, first and foremost. This is a group of people who love, live, and breathe fighting games. I see it every day. I think that will be the core focus of what we're making. I also know that Invincible fans will want to see something special and new and unique. And the fact that it's a 3D experience is a new take on Invincible. You're going to see new versions of characters that you love, new pieces of the story that you haven't seen before. So it's definitely worth checking out as an Invincible fan.

JENN PANATTONI: That's awesome, and I know you kind of touched on a few different things here. But going back, continue to talk about the community, because I love talking about the game community. I remember when we were discussing off-camera, you-all mentioned that you built this game with the fighting game community, for the fighting game community, almost like a love letter to the community, but also with them. What does that mean to you?

MIKE WILLETTE: It's amazing and serendipitous. For a lot of us, when we stopped working on K.I., we felt like we had unfinished business, and we really wanted to get back to a community that we just enjoyed being a part of. When we first set out on this journey, I'm like, we're going to playtest as early and often as possible. I started inviting people over to my house.

JENN PANATTONI: Nice.

MIKE WILLETTE: Got them under NDA, and were like, hey, bring a stick of your choice. And they're like, wait, what? I'm like, tell no one. And --

JENN PANATTONI: Bring your stick. It's going down.

MIKE WILLETTE: Yeah, it's going down. So they'd show up, and we'd just start playing, and getting feedback, and rolling, and this was like pre-alpha, like very early on. We wanted that feedback, and we wanted to see, hey, what's working? What's not working? What would you like to see? What are the things that we started on that you think we could amplify? What's really resonating? And kind of going from there. And then -- which was also really awesome, there was a good portion of them that were already Invincible fans. They're like, oh, shit, you know what would be really cool? If we did this. And it just -- it starts very small and then becomes kind of much bigger. So I'm so excited to share this with more of the world, and just get more people playing. That's what we're here for. We want more people to play fighting games.

CHRIS PAULSON: I'm super happy to be part of the team closing the loop. To be back in the Xbox Studios, where Killer Instinct was first part of Xbox, I think is really awesome because it feels like that never was done. And this is our chance to finish what was an unfinished project that is going to be all the things that could have been more.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, and just building it with the community, and that full circle moment, it's got to feel so incredible. I was mentioning that going to conventions, you always see on the big screen, these fighting game competitions, and they bring with them a certain energy that is unmatched elsewhere. It's almost like magnetic, how you just gravitate towards those folks when they're playing the game. So from an approachability standpoint, folks like myself are going to be jumping into the game. But then having those faithful Invincible fans a part of it, and those faithful fighting game fans a part of it, it's going to be so exciting to see. But those same people will be very mad if I don't ask what's next for the game, long way of saying that. So what do you all have coming down the road? We saw the trailer. We know it's coming in 2026. What's next for you all?

CHRIS PAULSON: We have an action-packed summer. We're going to be revealing and introducing all aspects of the game throughout the year, and I think some people have a chance to get hands-on. So keep your eyes out. I would definitely check out and follow all the Invincible VS socials. That's InvincibleVS, one word. TikTok, X, Instagram, YouTube.

MALIK PRINCE: Everywhere.

JENN PANATTONI: All the things, all the things. All right, well, Chris and Mike, we are at the end of the show here, and I am sad about this, but I'm also not sad because I kind of want to go back and play the game. So this is just really kind of convenient here, but before we go, do you have any final thoughts that you want to go ahead and let people know?

MIKE WILLETTE: Come find us. Come play with us. Honestly, it's really about that interaction. We think fighting games are so awesome. We want more people to play them, and it just takes like one minute to get hooked. So just come play with us. Let us know what you think, good or bad.

CHRIS PAULSON: Yeah. I think a lot of us grew up with comic books, playing fighting games in the 90s, like the heyday of Marvel and Street Fighter. And being able to reignite that flame is why we're here. If you would have told a 14-year-old version of me that I was doing this for a job, no one would believe it.

MIKE WILLETTE: I still don't believe it.

CHRIS PAULSON: Yeah, it's fricking amazing.

JENN PANATTONI: You wake up every morning, pinch me in my arm.

MALIK PRINCE: It is like a dream. Well, Chris and Mike, thank you so much for dropping by and also allowing us to play the game. It is super special. It's fun as hell also. So we're going to get back to playing it. So we should wrap this up, right, Jen?

JENN PANATTONI: Absolutely. We'll see you all on the next episode of the Official Xbox Podcast.

MALIK PRINCE: See you, everyone. [ Music ]