Interview With Carey DeVuono, Creator of Hollywood Mogul

Could you tell us more about the making of HM3?

The DOS version was restricted by all kinds of technological issues. The average computer hard drive was less than 100 megabytes. The executable file size could not exceed 640K. There was a considerable load game and save game time.

Now it’s years later and I’m thinking about HM3. Computers have come a long way. I’ve also learned a lot from the message boards. In the DOS and HM2.5 versions, the talent files were all one file. And the source types (there were only 3) were all the same file. You were able to customize these files with the early versions. But what I learned from the message boards was that the players were sharing the files.

So when I started thinking about HM3, at the top of the list was the idea that whatever I did was going to be customized and then shared. So all that functionality was built in. The talent files became four separate files, Actor, Actress, Producer, and Director. The writers were handled in a different way because I decided that rather than continually rewrite a screenplay, you just hired a writer to write it the way you wanted it done, and the time it took to complete was dependent on the amount of work you wanted.

I decided to expand the source material to 13 separate databases, plus the ability to create your own database. With each database being separate, I knew that some player somewhere would customize a Comic Book database and probably make it available for everyone. So the functionality of importing databases became part of the game.

With HM2.5 and earlier, you released a movie and that was it. But Video and DVD and since become a huge revenue source for studios, so the game was expanded to include post-release revenue.

And then everything was just made bigger and better, with more depth at every level. The marketing department was added which created a number of new features, including the ability to get money up front from foreign markets in exchange for you giving up your revenue in those markets when the movie was released.

The release department was expanded to include post-release Video and DVD including special features.

HM3 is so much bigger than HM2.5 that I really don’t know how to quantify it. But this might help you to understand. On the HM2 message board, there was a forum for the “HM3 Wish List.” I printed the entire thread out. It was 96 pages, with each page having dozens of individual requests. Well, 99% or more of what was on that list was already in the HM3 design. Plus a whole lot more that the Wish List didn’t mention. The few things from the Wish List that did not make it into the final game were things that I didn’t think were “gameable.” Or they just didn’t seem like fun to me.

HM3 was a huge leap forward in playability for the series. You could now play for 100 years. You could release hundreds and hundreds of movies. Competing studios were added to make the talent pool much more difficult to nail down for specific shoot dates. Rather than use a fixed storyline, no storylines were used in HM3. This dramatically increased the replayability of HM3, because the same title could be randomized into any of the 80+ genres every time you started a game. Because I didn’t have to worry about the storyline matching the genre, or matching the role requirements randomization.

There’s something like 8,500 titles in the 13 source databases. Each of those could be randomized to have up to 8 different roles, and those roles could be randomized along any of 8 or more individual attributes. Plus all of the randomization of the story attributes themselves. We’re talking about tens of millions of combinations. That’s replayability!

The other main thing I wanted with HM3 was that every department be fully displayed at the same time. I’m not sure now if that was a good idea. But it was my intention. There are so many choices available in HM3, I wanted you to be able to see everything that pertained to Marketing on one screen. Everything to do with Development is on its own screen. I’m not sure it was a good idea because a number of potential players got away from the game because they were overwhelmed by the amount of information that was displayed.

HM3 was a joy to write because computers had come far enough that I didn’t have to hold back in any way. HM3 was exactly what I wanted it to be. There isn’t anything I wanted to add that I didn’t. And that was very rewarding as a game designer.

Plus I had a secret weapon. A guy in the Netherlands named Kenny Hut. Eldritch, if you were on the old message board. He was a huge fan of the game, and had been playing since the DOS days. He tested HM3 eight or more hours a day for a year. He made my job much easier. And then when the beta was ready, the game was released to the message board members. That put another 300 or so people play-testing for six more months. And then finally, when there were no existing bugs to my knowledge, HM3 was officially released.

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