E3 2002: First Look: The Movies

Although Lionhead's console games, like Project Ego, have gotten most of the attention lately and have a large presence at E3, the studio is also hard at work on two major PC projects, Black & White 2 and a brand-new game, The Movies. While none of Lionhead's PC games are being shown on the E3 floor, we had the opportunity to talk with Peter Molyneux about the new game. The Movies challenges players to run a successful Hollywood movie studio, but it extends this role beyond mere management duties to include a hand in the creative process.

The Movies starts out in historic 1920s-era Hollywood, when the movie industry was young. In the role of producer, you'll build a studio from the ground up, designing the layout of the studio back lot, with its sets, props, and support buildings. Every movie starts out with a script, which you commission at the scriptwriting office. Specify the genre and major characteristics, and out comes a script to provide a basic framework for the production. Molyneux used Westerns as his primary example, and all the early screenshots of the game show Western-style sets. You can make classic variations on the basic genre, like action-packed Westerns or romance-laden Westerns, but there are also plenty of other genres. You can choose to make a premature version of Star Wars or even a sci-fi-themed Western, but the movie won't do well if it doesn't fit the actors, sets, and the audience expectations for the time period.

The goal of The Movies is to create a financially and critically successful studio. Because of the tremendous cost of sets, the key to making money in the game is to effectively build back-lot sets that fit your movie script but can be reused for later movies to save money. Each type of set has attributes, so it'd be tough to make a good romantic Western if all you have is a jail and a saloon. Plus, if you reuse sets too often in subsequent movies, critics and moviegoers will recognize this and be turned off. The quality, star power, and marketing of a movie directly influences its success, both at the box office and when it comes time to hand out Academy Awards. Competition from other studios raises the stakes for success, and one way to grow is to acquire your competitors.

One element that makes The Movies stand out from a management-style game, like Molyneux's own game Theme Park, is that players can directly influence how a movie turns out with real-time controls. You don't have to attend to anything as detailed as camera angles--where you place cameras on sets takes care of that--but there are sliders that directly influence what actors do. At this point, we know there's a violence slider and a romance slider right now, but there will be more factors as well. If you're shooting a saloon scene like the one in the first batch of screenshots, you could turn the violence bar all the way up to start a gunfight or just turn it up a notch to get an actor to throw a punch. If you instead turn up the romance slider a notch, the star actor might walk over and give the woman behind the bar a kiss. In characteristic fashion, Molyneux pointed out that the maximum romance slider could prompt a sex scene, but that that wouldn't go over well with 1920s audiences.

Part of what makes the filming process as seamless as possible is that the actors' personalities play a part in how films turn out. In fact, you don't absolutely need to touch the real-time sliders at all. It's important to pick the right actors for the right movies. To take Molyneux's modern examples, Hugh Grant wouldn't make much of an action hero, and Schwarzenegger wouldn't make a good romantic lead. But creating stars isn't as easy as it may seem, and you'll have to deal with the egos that fame produces.

The Movies includes some features characteristic of Molyneux's vision. For example, players will be able to save movies they produce to the hard drive and then share them online. It would be possible to create feature-length, 90-minute movies, but during the game, you'll primarily see what amounts to a 20-second trailer of the movie you create, focusing on the scenes that you tweaked most with the real-time action settings.

The Movies has been in development only since January, but Molyneux says it's coming together surprisingly quickly. The game is being developed by a new team at Lionhead, but despite the studio's rapid expansion over the last couple of years, Molyneux still manages to keep a hand in the design process. Lionhead isn't talking about release dates for any of the games it has in early development, but the general indication was that what we saw was for "maybe next year, maybe the year after."