Interview With Carey DeVuono, Creator of Hollywood Mogul

I was very lucky recently and was able to interview Carey DeVuono (aka HMdesigner), the creator of Hollywood Mogul, about how the game series has developed and his thoughts on the Kickstarter campaign.

For those unfamiliar, Hollywood Mogul (now Hollywood Movie Studio) is a text-based Business Simulation game that puts you in charge of a major Hollywood movie studio. You choose which projects to develop, who will star in and produce your new movie, and everything else…right down to the budget and how many screens to release the final cut on.

The game was ranked as one of the top three strategy games of all time by Computer Gaming World, according to wikipedia. I cannot thank Carey enough for giving this interview.

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Moby’s – How did you get into making a game about Hollywood and movie making?

Carey DeVuono – In 1991 I had written a screenplay and my agent took it into the system at Fox. They told me it was “too broad of a comedy.” To this day I really don’t know what that means. I think they just didn’t like it. The next year a director friend of mine wanted to do it, so we did a quick polish and took it back into Fox where he had a relationship. They passed again. The next year a producer with a housekeeping deal at Fox, who was also a friend of my director friend, said he wanted to get involved. So we went back to Fox. And they passed again. And I said to myself, (insanely, I realize now): If I just had a computer program where I could run the numbers I would show them this would make money.

And then I thought: That sounds like fun anyway. So I bought a book and taught myself how to program a computer, and the next year I released the original DOS version of Hollywood Mogul.

Where you surprised by the public response to the initial version? And did that lead to the sequel, HM2?

I don’t know if “surprised” is the right word. I was happy. It got a few good reviews. And a few bad ones. Computer Gaming World magazine seemed to like it quite a bit, which was nice. The bad reviews all centered around the fact that there were almost no graphics in the game. The bad reviews complimented the excellent game play, but ultimately gave it a bad review score because of the lack of graphics.

HM2 was not really a “second version” of the original. It was more of a Windows port. Just as the DOS version was coming out, Windows 3.1 was becoming very popular, new computers were being sold, and those new computers had CD drives. So suddenly, having a game on a CD was a big deal, and a big selling point. So HM2 was the Windows port. And it was released on CD-ROM.

Then came HM2.5. This was the Windows port with a few new features. I don’t even remember what they were, to be honest. But I did begin to add things.

You have to remember that when the DOS version came out, the average computer had an 80 megabyte hard drive. And you were lucky if you had 4 megabytes of RAM. Think about that. That’s 4,000K of RAM. I have 8 gigabytes of RAM on my current system. That’s 8,000,000K of RAM.

My point is that the DOS version was the best I could make it for the average computer system out there. As computers got better over the years, I added new features to the HM2.5 version (which became 2.5b, 2.5c, 2.5d, and finally 2.5e). But all those improvements were built on the architecture of the original Windows port. There were other things that I wanted to add, but they would require a complete rewrite. And that was when I started thinking about HM3.

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