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.
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.
