I mean, sure, I’d bleed a little bit of money to keep all the grips and extras standing around, but the important thing was time, dear God, time: That clock was ticking down through the months and six other studios were turning out much better movies, so I had to beat them with quantity.

Take 10: The Beautiful People
In The Movies, there is a Character Studio tool for customizing your actor’s faces. The character models lack muscular detail and the animation options provide only a simplistic palette of emotions. These qualities give all of the actors a disposable, interchangeable quality.

I overcame this effect by trying to model my actors and directors on particular celebrities, giving Jim Carrey and Steve Carrell stand-ins dark hair and putting them in comedy films, and giving Angelina Jolie and Catherina Zeta Jones evening gowns and making them romantic leads. This strategy helped personalize the experience, but it was difficult to maintain this level of craft as dozens of new characters rotated into increasingly complex productions.

This gets into a deeper problem with the game, which also applies to most other sims – the characters are overly generic. Particularly as your studio grows over time and you have a roster of ten to fifteen actors and directors – they all look the same. Everyone’s pretty skinny, the same height, they move the same, aging has virtually no effect save some graying hair and tiny, surface-level wrinkles. And if you keep them in the latest styles to maintain their necessary image, they all need to wear the same limited modern selection of three to five in vogue outfits. It’s like picking between Tom Cruise or Ethan Hawke or Ben Stiller to star in every movie – after a while, what’s the dif?

Take 11: Denouement
For all of the complexity of the game, including the historical details, the inside jokes, the depth of the production tool, and the maintenance of a robust online community, sales for The Movies have been underwhelming. Lionhead Studios, the developer of the game, recently fired 50 staff members and cancelled its plans to release the game on videogame platforms.

ADVERTISEMENT

So we may never find out what the game would look like in its 2.0 and 3.0 incarnations with modern-looking character models. The Movies is a unique creative tool, but the developers got greedy and marketed the game towards a younger and lower-tech demographic than its core of audience of 20 and 30something techie pop culture aficionados interested in film production. By trying to appeal to tweens and teens, the Lionhead studio team created a clumsy graphic user interface that radically conflicts with the intense time management and film production aspects of the game.

Like many big-budget Hollywood failures, though, the game has developed a cult following. It could end up being one of those games that sticks around the fringes of creatively-inspired gamers and low-budget animators for many years to come. You can connect with aspiring machinimators at //www.lionhead.com/themovies/ , where they posted “machinima” (machine cinema) community news and have a community forum.

Lo and behold, Lionhead recently released The Movies’ expansion pack: Stunts & Effects. You can now unleash a Godzilla-type monster onto a cityscape, direct a chase scene with a car jumping off a ramp and spinning through mid-air, and cast a bearded martial arts guru to open up a can of whup-ass on a young disciple. The expansion pack expands the in-game movie-making tools, essentially making it more of a version 1.5 upgrade than an expansion pack. Will Stunts be The Movies’ blockbuster sequel, or will adding in car chases cause the franchise to jump the shark?