Lionhead’s The Movies is 20 years old now; do you feel old yet?

I still have the big, bulky box, the expansion, the manual, and the whole thing, despite effectively being abandonware by this point. For those of us older than Jesus’ first pair of sandals, Lionhead Studios might be widely known for Black & White – a God game where a red Danny DeVito tells you to do bad things and a White Morgan Freeman to do good things. Or maybe it is that whole Fable business that really took off. However, between Black & White 2 and Fable II, Lionhead Studios, which was basically a break-off from Bullfrog known for Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital, made The Movies.

As much as Fable was an RPG and Black & White were God games, The Movies was a return to form from a studio founded by Peter Molyneux, Mark Webley, and studio Creative Director Gary Carr, to name a few. The Movies was a business management game set in the movie industry, starting in the 1920s with silent film, advancing through the ages to modern film – green/blue screen, big sets, special effects, and even the expansion pack added a bunch of stunts and larger effects. The thing is, it wasn’t just a business management game.

The Movies was a movie-making tool, back when most of us made little abandoned masterpieces with Windows Movie Maker, and were looking for something more. Something more expansive, something you could shape and form a bit more, something you could do voice-overs for, something that lets you do big explosions without the Fire Department down the road having a word, something where you could throw someone off of a building for no reason other than it looks cool and not have an investigation by the police about unsafe business practices, and so on. Believe it or not, that’s exactly what The Movies was.

The Movies wasn’t total creative freedom – you had to work with the tools and animations available, but generally it was more expansive than anything else offered for kids. However, as much as I can babble on about how amazing the in-game editor and exporter were, alongside the direction tools to make your own movie, everything seemed to fall in place for The Movies. Not only 20 years ago (hold for vomit) were we in the fallout of smacking imps up in Dungeon Keeper, but The Sims 2 was only released the previous September, and I’d argue there is some influence there too.

Each actor, director, writer, producer, and such had a sense of personality, to some degree. Not only do your staff want to make movies, but you also have to create a movie lot that has pretty trees, nice trailers for certain actors, big trailers for mega stars, bars for alcoholics, rehab centers for the alcoholics that have gone a bit too far, restaurants to develop eating disorders in (it was 2005), and so on. If that wasn’t enough, you have cosmetic surgery buildings if you don’t like the look of an actor’s face.

There truly is something special about The Movies that is often imitated but rarely replicated to its fullest extent. I’m looking at you, The Executive – Movie Industry Tycoon, Blockbuster Inc., Movies Tycoon, the as-yet-unreleased (and possibly abandoned) Movie Studio Tycoon, the AI-generated Super Movie Tycoon that I saw the other day, and a handful of others. Lionhead had something special, not just from a development standpoint but also in the overall presentation.

One of the true highlights is the soundtrack from Daniel Pemberton, who did a few things here or there since. The soundtrack for Hell’s Kitchen, Dirk Gently, some Black Mirror, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a couple of other games like Little Big Planet 1 and 2, oh yeah, and something else he’s done to perfection, the entire Spider-Verse trilogy. Sometimes when I sit in silence, my head plays “Relaxing By The Sea” from The Movies soundtrack – a very good incidental piece.

Not only is, or rather was The Movies such a good creative tool or Sims-like observation of clashing personalities, it was a bloody good business simulator too. Yearly awards, star ratings for your schlocky B-horror movies, and trying to keep the business afloat into the 21st century (that’s where I live!), it had everything to make it so enjoyable. Yet despite that, if you look online or you were online during that time, people actually made movies and shared them on a small startup platform that was founded only several months prior, YouTube. From questionable shot-for-shot remakes of trailers to short political films based on real issues, The Movies is unrivaled.

Yet somehow, two decades later, there still hasn’t been a sequel because the studio was shut down, Molyneux went mad (madder than usual), Activision and SEGA clearly never did anything ever again (that’s a joke), and the rest of the studio moved on to different projects. As I said, Lionhead Studios had Mark Webley and Gary Carr, the co-founders of Two Point Studios, where they’d go on to make Theme Hospital re-skins for the modern day. I think Molyneux is still farting about Masters of Albion, which will unlikely see the light of day in a good way. I’ve played The Trail, Peter. I know your recent legacy.

The reality is, The Movies is abandoned and we’re likely never getting it back, thanks to publishing rights being spread all over the place, Lionhead being shuttered by Microsoft, and the studio’s staff going their separate ways. The only way to still play it is to have the disc, and given nearly every computer has abandoned the disc drive 10-15 years ago, even that’s difficult. It truly is a shame that such a masterpiece of creativity and fun is lost to a shrug of business shoulders, compatibility, and generally the slow march towards our graves as we forget about a great— No, fantastic game.