Interview: Makin' Molyneux's Movies

"Saturday night at the movies, who cares what picture you see?" Peter Molyneux does, as making movies is the core concept of his latest title. Do you picture yourself as a studio mogul, an award winning director or even a super agent and star maker? What about writing and directing your own mini feature for all the world to see?

Well apparently The Movies is going to make all of these things possible, so we recently made the long pilgrimage down to sunny Guildford, home to Lionhead HQ, to catch up with Peter Molyneux and The Movies' team to see how work is progressing on the game.

Here's what we learned in this, the director's cut.

The Movies sounds like a great concept for a game but how will it actually work in practice?

Peter Molyneux: Well people can sort of experiment and play around with the way they want to play the game. We don't drive the game through challenges, we don't say, 'you must make a movie by 1940.' We drive the game by saying: "Make the movie studio of your choice and create the stars of your choice."

What we've tried to do is make it really accessible and simple through balancing and refining. Just the idea that in design terms you can come in and take over someone's game is really, really important to us. If this game was just all about making movies I don't think it would be successful, but because it's about making movies, running a studio and looking after stars and each of those being very unique to your game; that's the really important part. It is your studio and it's like no-one else's studio, they're your films and they're like nobody else's films and your stars are like no-one else's stars.

But won't some people just want to ignore the simulation and make their own mini movies - is that possible?

Peter Molyneux: Well there's something about money in the game which is a bit surprising. If you look at the screen, there's no money on it all. The realisation is that you can go totally into debt if you want to. What I found when playing the game is that I wanted to run my studio and make just one film and it would be a huge film in the nature of Star Wars. That means I want to spend as much as I want to spend. You can go into the red, into debt as much as you like, when you go into debt you move down the movie studios' league table, but you can spend as much as you like on your movie and you can make fortunes on that side.

That's one part of playing the game, the other thing is in the main menu you can just click on any year and go in there, the simulation will be turned off and you can make your movie. So if you just want to make movies, you can just make movies. If this game was just all about making movies though I don't think it would be successful. We are still thinking that you have to play a bit of the game to unlock that, so that you get used to it, there's no real tutorial. Essentially though if you just want to make movies, you can.

There have been some recent changes to the interface and scoring systems though?

Peter Molyneux: The biggest thing has been taking away all the icons, putting in those little bubbles that popped up with information. These are what we're calling tool tips albeit very intelligent tool tips so they'll give you the information you need to know, because what we found was that in a classic sense in games like Theme Park and Theme Hospital, you had the screen up top and you had your information and menu bars down the bottom.

What you found was you didn't ever look up into the game world. Our interface doesn't sound very revolutionary but it is, it means you do constantly look into the game world. We're using that exact same system in Black & White 2. In B&W 2 you just get the screen, there's not even one single icon at the start of the game, it's all set inside the world and I think that actually makes a big big difference to how you play.

Lastly, rather than a set of challenges coming up, there are these three tables, one for your stars, one for your films and one for your studio. To get the most successful studio of all time, you have to have number one stars, number one movies and the number one studio. That simple mechanic is the compulsive nature of the game because you do find it's irresistible. You think "Right I want my stars to be number one two and three, how am I gonna do that? Through the movies, or via the papers?"

How important will people's movies become? Can you tell us a little more about how people might enter them for film festivals?

Peter Molyneux: Well the amazing thing is that what people have already been able to do with the very limited tools they've got, like the Red and Blue stuff in Halo and some of the stuff you've seen from Half-Life 2. But that takes an enormous effort to do. The idea here is that you can do it really, really simply and quickly. I'm sure there'll be some people, and I don't suppose it will be millions of people, but some people will spend a huge amount of time on their movies and make something which is a proper story and has proper dialogue and that can be submitted to a film festival. That would be fantastic.

Do you see anyone winning a festival with a Movies' movie?

Peter Molyneux: Well who knows? I mean I don't suppose it'll be on general release put it that way. But you know on the internet now I think the Red and Blue stuff has had three million downloads. I'm playing this game, I've just made this movie I think it's pretty good, you upload it to our website and you see fifty thousand people have seen the movie you made and it is really compulsive. And of course, you're doing that as part of playing a game, it's a side effect of playing a game; you get to show off.

What's been the movie industry's reaction to the game? Do they see it as threat or a complement to their industry?

Peter Molyneux: Well there's some very funny stories with it. Hollywood is insane, as a place, how any movie is made I just haven't got a clue. It's an amazing place to make a movie.

The first reaction from the movie industry is that they wanted to buy the rights to make the movie - I've got to get this right - to make the movie of The Movies. I had to sit down and explain to them, because they approached us and said: "We'd like to make some movies about some of your games and the movie we want to make first, is one based around The Movies." So I had to say: "Well look this is actually a game about your industry, and it's not really suitable. I don't think it's a really good idea." I had to convince them it wasn't a really good idea.

I've also shown it to screenwriters, scriptwriters and directors and I've had a couple of people say: "Oh god, now technology is here we're not needed as actors any more." They're very insecure in Hollywood, they don't like the idea that... for example I was talking to them about this thing called the Hero's journey and how we use it in game to this very famous scriptwriter. He said "You can't do that it'll ruin people's enjoyment of movies, this is one of our secrets!" It's quite amazing their reaction.

People have voiced some concerns about the console versions of The Movies?

Peter Molyneux: They're right to be concerned and there is one thing about the console versions, which is a problem. We can do the movie making side, pretty much with all the content. The disk capacity is big enough to do that, that's not the problem. The problem is that on the PC you've got a mouse and it makes you feel like a god. It means you can reach over there and do this, reach over there and do that.

Console games use a controller so you can't do that and so there is a fundamental difference with the console version, and that is you're not up here [like a god view], but your down here inside the studio. I won't go into details of what that means, but from the game's point of view it has a very different feel. You're playing much more of a person, but you can make movies, they're unique movies, you can do exactly what you can on the PC version. What is different is the way that you play the game.

The movie making side is easy, comparatively; once you've got the technology, there is a thing, especially on PS2 where you've got the EyeToy, which we're trying to support and that gives you the ability - and this is not publicly known I think - but it give you the ability to put in your own backdrops to the sets. You can put in any backdrop you like, and one of them is an EyeToy image. You can have anything you put in front of the EyeToy camera as the backdrop to your set. That's cool.

Someone did something cool with Lego and had the EyeToy pointing at that and it looked amazingly cool. You will be able to do all that. The key is the game will have to be as compulsive as it is on PC and I think if we tried to simulate the mouse, it just wouldn't work.

Can you tell us a little more about how you'll judge users' movies and the awards you're going to put into place?

Peter Molyneux: Well I think it's really important that if we have this upload facility, that it's not only us judging but also the idea is trying to get some famous people to judge it, some famous directors to judge the best.

The idea is that we have a website and you upload your movie to a website and it goes into an area which is age restricted. The game is easy to mod and one of the things you could do is remove clothing. They are more or less biologically correct so you obviously have to have some form of censorship. These are then judged by a panel before it goes to another area and then that's weeded down before being shown on the site. We're trying to get it so the awards you get really do mean something, so you could get flown out to America and attend premieres and meeti real stars. But that's a lot of work.

The Movies stretches for a hundred years - will the stars you've built up die after a set period of time?

Peter Molyneux: What you can do - and this is the design answer to that - this is where there's some smoke and mirrors and we have to break from reality. You can start the game and hire an actor when they're 16 and they will be with you for the whole of your game and you'll be very sad if they die.

So what we're doing is making available one of the medical facilities a rejuvenation chamber where they can be rejuvenated at an enormous cost and we're effectively cheating about death. If you leave them they will die, but if you rejuvenate them they will go back to being younger. You could even take them all the way back to being 16 again, but it would cost you unbelievable amounts of money. If we really had that invention, I believe Hollywood would be very, very keen to talk to us.

One of things you originally talked about was future movie tech. How has that been progressing, is it still in the game?

Peter Molyneux: With these kind of games you need some kind of story otherwise it tends to go on forever and you just get exhausted and you start thinking 'what's the point?'. The idea of the game is that you're playing from the dawn of Hollywood to more or less the present day, when there'll be a lifetime achievement award. If you've done some of the right things at the right time, you'll win one of those lifetime achievement awards. It could be an overall award, a studio award, stars award, a film award.

But you can carry on playing beyond that and we've got one or two very futuristic technologies which you can unlock a very long time in the future and I mean a very, very long time in the future. There is a rumour that you can keep on going until the year 3000 and there might be some future tech you can unlock there. But essentially most of the tech is unlocked by the time you get to the present day.

Will you be able to make trailers for your movies?

Peter Molyneux: Absolutely you can. You can pick up your movie, put it into post-production and save it off as a separate version so you can just cut your own trailer. Trailers don't work on the AI system as well, because if you try and release a trailer as a movie, the critics will pan that trailer.

However pick up the trailer and put it into marketing and it works great. This is where our 'pick up and place' interface works really well. If you pick up a movie and put it into marketing, that trailer will be released with another film, which will add to its marketing effort.

So you can put all your money into marketing and make an average movie a big success?

Peter Molyneux: Heh, well how many movies have you seen that do exactly that? I mean most of them. But definitely, you can keep on spending money on movies and advertising and you can do things like picking up an actor and before the movie's released you can put them into PR and they'll do the PR on that latest movie. That mechanic: just think about what it means to have an actor, film or an object in your hand and how that can apply. You can put it anywhere you like in your studio and quite often it'll have an interesting effect. This is all just a little experiment, people will experiment and play around with it and find suggestions.

Firstly you make your movie, say a four star movie, you put your best actors in it, you shoot the movie. While they're shooting you pick up one of the actors and put them in PR, so they start doing PR on it. You release your film and put it into marketing, the film's released and it's a big success. Then five years later you pick up the film from your archive, you can re-release it again just before the sequel comes out. How do you make the sequel? You pick up the film and put it back into scriptwriting. It's all just about picking things up and putting them in places and it works just amazingly well.

Do you have any plans for free downloadable content for The Movies?

Peter Molyneux: Yes definitely, in fact we're considering, although this is not official, we're considering releasing the star maker, you know being able to put your own face in a few weeks before, so people can appear in their own game. What we're hoping is to have lots and lots of downloadable content on day one and we're supporting fan sites and the mod community.

What about unlockable content within the game structure itself?

Peter Molyneux: Yeah, the way that that works is that as you play through the game, depending on the prestige of your studio that's how quickly content is unlocked. Features get unlocked like say in 1924 was the first colour film, so that's when the colour technology gets unlocked.

You can of course unlock it before that in-game and so it's more or less - we've cheated in a couple of places - but it's more or less historically correct. You've got to remember it's not just the obvious things, but it's the fact that in the 1980s they discovered they could shoot action films in a completely different way. They almost discovered the action genre. In the 1990s they re-discovered the horror genre and in the 1980s they realised they could make a horror film which could make you laugh as well, which is like Friday 13th and Halloween.

This is the kind of stuff that you can unlock as well, we do all that in The Movies and on the timeline you can see stuff like Comedy Horror as a genre. In the present, today's world, they're kind of rediscovering the original horror film as well.

You mentioned that you gave out copies of the game to other Lionhead personnel so they could test it - what's the funniest or most unusual thing they produced?

Peter Molyneux: I think the funniest thing was certain members of Lionhead in a ...romantic scene, I won't go any further than that. But it was funny to see two people from testing, it is just hilarious when you see that.

How's work on Black & White 2 progressing?

Peter Molyneux: Fantastic! The funny thing is there's a lot of things in Black & White 2 that are also in The Movies. I know that sounds bizarre but I had to work on two games at once and I thought, I'll use the same things for both, it'll make my life easier. But B&W2 is just an unbelievable combination of RTS game and a god game, you've never seen anything like it.

All the screenshots we're saving because we're doing a movie at the moment and some of the cities that have been built now are just incredible. Then you get to build huge armies and go out and destroy them and that was everything I ever wanted as a boy. It is as good as it gets, I mean I think B&W2 is as close to the next generation as you'll see, with all the physics engine stuff.

Are you any closer to naming a release date for that?

Peter Molyneux: The only thing I can tell you is that on Thursday of last week [31 March] The Movies went pre-alpha, which means we're starting to build the pre-alpha builds and B&W 2 also went pre-alpha. Fable PC was a week ahead of schedule. It's the new world of Lionhead! See what happens when I'm no longer a programmer. We're sort of shooting for autumn on all three, but that's very loose as there's plenty of balancing to be done and that could take some time.

Talking of Fable: The Lost Chapters, don't you think it would be nice for Xbox owners to get that original content too?

Peter Molyneux: It would be nice but that's all I can say for the moment. It is a third bigger, there's a third more content in every respect. We could have delayed Fable another six months on Xbox, but we would have got crucified for that. However I think it's an opportunity to give those people - at a reasonable price - a kind of Director's Cut. It is very cool with the mouse [on PC ] you can use the left button using each button as a kind of left and right hands in game. It feels very different actually.

John Houlihan