Games interview: Making it at the movies - Molyneux speaks

Posted on 7 Aug 2003 at 10:49

Peter Molyneux doesn't like to do things the easy way. While every other developer seems to be obsessed with dreaming up new and ever more appalling scenes of destruction, the renaissance man of gaming is more interested in creating.

It's an admirable trait, but it's meant that in the past some of Pete's games have suffered from a creative shortfall - there's often some discrepancy between the original vision and the final product, though that's not stopped titles like Black and White and classic God sim Populous selling by the barge-load. Molyneux's latest title, The Movies (due on PC and next-gen consoles), is as dauntingly ambitious as ever; here the man himself tells us what we can expect...

For those of us unfamiliar with this title, can you give us some background?

Molyneux: The Movies is a simple concept where you run a movie studio from about the 1920s up to more or less the modern day, where you get to create movie stars, make and shoot movies, and if they're successful you get more money for your movie studio and you're able to make more movies; it's as simple as that really.

I don't know if you've played games like Theme Park or Theme Hospital before, but a lot of the people working on The Movies are the same people who worked on those games; they were incredibly successful games at the time, which was a fair old while ago now, but counting all the incarnations I think they sold about ten million copies between them.

The Movies concept started about 18 months ago when I suddenly thought: 'Why the hell hasn't someone done a game about making movies?' You know, we've got simulations about running zoos and simulations about shopping malls and airports and god knows what else, bizarre things like making sushi or pizza, but no-one's really done anything about making movies. It seemed like an obvious thing, and so I came to work and said: 'What do you think of this for an idea?'

Take us through the beginning stages of making a movie.

Molyneux: We're still working on animations, sound effects; the menu system is purely functional at the moment, there's only a fraction of the content that's going to appear in the final game, but hopefully I can show you a glimpse of what we're trying to achieve.

The game starts in around about the 1920s, but the example we're looking at is set in the 1960s, and your studio is now big enough to enable you to film more than one movie at a time.

So you'll need to place down buildings on the lot, decide how much to spend on those buildings; so we've got a shoddy scriptwriter's office here, which isn't going to produce great scripts because there's only one bloke and an old typewriter in there.

There's a nice place for your stars to hang out, which is very important; you need to keep your stars happy. You have to find them, create them; originally they're very grateful to you but then they star in a couple of movies and they're bastards.

They start getting egos, they develop drinking problems, you have to put them in rehab, they have affairs with each other - it's not a pretty sight. Looking after your stars and keeping their egos massaged is very important.

So then you've got the standard buildings, warehouses, props rooms, movie studios, but by far the most important buildings are the sets themselves, where your movies are going to be shot. These sets already exist, but you can add your own props, and elements to them.

So in one part of the studio you've got a Western being shot, you've got your bar scene, with everything you'd expect from a bar scene, you'll probably have a shoot out going on in there. So now you can actually start making the movie, which is the core of what the game is.