The Movies

With the Black and White series, Lionhead Studios gave us the chance to be god. And now in “The Movies”, we get to be a Hollywood producer, doing everything from choosing which script to use and managing money to directing the movies in real time.

The game takes place from the 1920s’ black and white films to the present day and into the future. You get to choose which movies you want to film, decide the content, choose the sets you film on, the actors and their costumes. As time advances, new options become available and you can make the first color films, use special effects, introduce new camera techniques and later, even holograms and other futuristic technology. Every movie you choose to make will automatically have a web page created for it. The web page will advertise the movie, selling the concept, naming the stars and the movies they previously worked on. Your name will be the name of the studio producing the movie.

Every movie you make will generate a short promotional trailer which will display all the choices you made about the content, sets, actors, sounds and lighting. The trailer will be displayed in a cinematic style and from the perspective of a finished film. If you like your trailer that much, you can even save it and put it on the net for everyone to see. Anyone who views your trailer can give you a rating between 1 and 100. Every month there will be an awards ceremony that rewards the creator of the best trailer with a congratulations e-mail and maybe a prize.

The Movies will be published by Activison and will be released sometimes in 2004.