In 2005, there was one game I wanted to play more than any other:The Movies. The simulation game from Peter Molyneux’s Lionhead Studios attempted to bring the full Hollywood experience toPCplayers, allowing them to run their own companies, build their own studios, greenlight movies, and best of all, create those movies and share them online.
As an 11-year-old who loved video games and movies in equal measure, this sounded like my dream game. At this point, I had dabbled with shooting my own short films with friends, but was always stymied by the process of editing the footage together. Actually, that’s not true, I was stymied by the process of figuring out which equipment I needed to upload my footage to so I could edit it together. Now, the process is as simple as plugging an SD card into your laptop. But in 2005, footage was still stored on tapes. Other kids figured it out. I never did.
A Way To Overcome IRL Tech Challenges
So when The Movies was announced, I was stoked. I wouldn’t even need to figure out any external technical aspects, I’d be able to do everything right there in myGameCube. I waited patiently, checking Nintendo Power every month so that I would be the first to see when a date got announced for the port.
Months passed, it never came, and the ports were quietly canceled — likely due to the PC game stalling out commercially. I never played The Movies, and have never been able to get my hands on it because it’s no longer available digitally.
It currently has more than 16,000 votes on theDreamlist, GOG.com’s PC port wishlist, though, so upvote it if you want to play it, too.
We Need The Movies 2
More than an opportunity to play the primitive original, I want to see a developer take up the mantle and run with it. There are many games about making games —Super Mario Maker,Dreams,Roblox, Levelhead, and more — and there are games about running movie studios — including this year’s Hollywood Animal and The Executive. There was even a spiritual successor called Blockbuster Inc. — but theSteam reviews are Mixed overall, and recent evaluations are Very Negative. Since The Movies, there hasn’t been a game at the scale Molyneux was working at that effectively gamified the actual act of moviemaking.
Though, to be fair, Dreams supported animation alongside its game-making capabilities. It’s just that the game was better known and more thoroughly marketed as a tool for game creation.
Which is a shame, because you could do something far more impressive in 2025 than in 2005. The Movies offered the opportunity to make crude machinima. But The Movies 2 could offer the opportunity to make… much less crude machinima.
Movie-making software has come a long way in the last 20 years and The Movies 2 could take cues from the modern versions of Adobe Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve, Epidemic Sound, Artlist.io, and other creative suites that give users sound effects, coloring software, music, transitions, filters, and, of course, the ability to efficiently cut footage together. Better character models and environments would be a flashy upgrade, but more usable tools would allow users to produce films that go beyond, say, The French Democracy, a janky short made in The Movies that got some attention at the time.
Maybe the best case scenario would be for Photo Modes to evolve into Movie Modes. Games are already letting us break through the fourth wall and poke around the edges of the level, andGhost of Tsushimaexpanded the toolset to allow players to make short clips of animation — essentially gifs. Imagine ifGrand Theft Auto 6added a mode to let you shoot scenes around Vice City. A game-by-game basis approach would allow for a far wider array of locations than one all-in-one game could manage. Maybe the next The Movies isn’t one game. Maybe it’s every game.
