The Movies: homa🌱ge to Hollywood, or a parody in the form of a mana♋gement sim?
The flimsy sets held together with gaffer-tape we can accept. The queue of desperate hopefuls pleading for a moment of fame outside our agent's office raises a smirk. Even fu🐻nnier: our blockbuster product🍬ion haemorrhaging resources because the lead actor is a drunk.
But enforcing the application of The Hero's Journey to churn out u🔥ser-created epics... ꦫthat's more than parody. It's cynicism.
The Hero's Journey is an infamous device used in H꧋ollywood scriptwriting classes, a five-step plan at the heart of every formulaic film.
On the wall of Lionhead's spacious boardroom, that formula is laid out pat. A hero of humble origin (part one - Departure) is forced into a great ⛄journey or quest (part two - Initiation). The quest can be physical or internal (part three - Dragon Battle).
He me🌟ets his ideal partner along the way (part four - Romance). Then it's the finale, and the re✤turn home (part five - Return).
"The Hero's Journey will ruin films 🌜for you," chuckles Lionhead's supremo, Pet💟er Molyneux. "You can't look at anything without comparing the story to the steps in the plan."
The Hero's Journey is the reason The Movies can work. Lionhead's huge team of artists fill a cavernous hanger of an office, a good football pitch's worth of cubicles and curious animation folk, and they're busy prepping hours and hours ♊worth of sequences based around the steps of The Hero's Journey, applied to every genre.
It's an ideal modular template into whi✨ch we will be free to plug in our chosen stars, props, sets and scripts, simply by dragging them off the lot, and onto the stage.
That freedom was put to the test in a movie-making competition between Lionhead's staff. "We got a lot of homosexuality. I mean, a LOT of𒉰 homosexuality," says 🦹Peter, slightly bemused. "I don't know what that says about Lionhead."
He shows us a highly rated entry: Ha♔ppy Gays, complete with a breas𝓰t-obsessed Fonzie and a rambling, barely audible amateur voice-over.
There's another revelation at the heart of The Movies. It's the realisation tha🌜t management games don't have to be about end♐less screens of statistics, economics, and balancing columns of figures.
"I was playing The Movies a couple of months ago," explains Peter, "and I realised that all I was doin📖g was flipping between chart after chart. I wasn't actually seeing my studio. We had to sit down and completely redesign the interface."
Now management is physical, more hands-on. Information appears as interconnected bubbles - and only when you request it. You don't just order stars onto a set, youღ drag them out of rehearsals and onto the stage. Movie scripts are physical objects, as are sets and props, even the staff.
Drag one piece on to෴ another ꦑfor surprising reactions. Handymen and starlets go well together. So do best boys and your leading man, but that's Hollywood. Scripts and handymen. Writers and booze. The potential for self destruction is... enormous.
In turn, that should birth something special. The Hero's Journey is about toౠ begin.
The M꧅ovies is out for PC in the autumn. A release date for the PS2, Xbox and Game🃏cube versions is yet to be confirmed
