Blockbuster Inc

Blockbuster Inc brings the lights, cameras and action of Hollywood to the PC in a game that takes a lot of its inspiration from the management sims that have come before it: The Movies, The Sims, the Tycoon series and the Two Point series.

In Super Sly Fox’s debut game, you’re a budding movie mogul, starting your journey in the the movie-making world.

There’s a lengthy tutorial to learn the basic skills: From building a small studio (you can either build it from scratch or use prefabricated templates, to hiring actors, writers and directors to training stunt people, pos-production and marketing your movie. It’s a comprehensive tutorial but it bugged out on me when I had to hire a second marketing person, so I quit and started going it alone.

You select the time period you’d like to start in (1920s, 1930s, 1980s) and the genre of movie/production you’d like to make and away you go. Your overall budget depends on what difficulty you use (medium or normal starts you with $300,000).

Once I’d built my studio using some of the pre-built rooms, I hired a director, writer, actor and researcher (as well as some other staff) and we started work on our first feature full, an action movie with a medieval theme called The Forbidden Coffee (the game generated the name but like your studio title, you can rename it). With a total budget of $300,000, it wasn’t going to be a major blockbuster. and the budget allowed for a three scene movie, all filmed on one set with very little frills.

Like all management sims, there’s a lot to manage in Blockbuster Inc

I take my hat off to the small development team (three main people, I think) to tackling such a mammoth task. You’ll find yourself not only having to manage the temperament of your lead actor, but also finding you’ll have to deal with the personal problems of the director, fund research that will allow you to buy better equipment and sets and plot out the schedules of your staff, as well as having to fend off shady mafia types who can provide you more money.

After an over zealous hiring spree, I ran out of money during production and couldn’t afford to feed my team the already low-cost meals the canteen was providing. They weren’t happy and started complaining on set. For some inexplicable reason, I had built a second canteen (I only had 11 staff) so demolishing that put a few more dollars into the kitty and things started looking better.

The first movie took 13 months to complete, including time off while our actor recovered from an injury, and received middling scores from critics (66%). I had $4 in the bank and that mafia guy (called Guiseppe) kept asking me if I needed help and wanted to borrow some money. I kept telling him “no thank you” but I feel he’ll keep trying and I’ll eventually say “Go on then” and see what happens.

Before too long, I had four movies in the can (ranging from middling to fair reviews), and after pressure from Guiseppe again I accepted a small loan of $60,000. I’m sure there were no strings attached …

After my time with Blockbuster Inc, I can see if has some solid foundations but after a few hours you start seeing the same complaints from actors or scenarios popping up, and I wonder whether it could have done with a few more months in the oven before being released to the public to iron out some of the rough edges and provide an experience that people will want play for months to come.

…and Developers that care

To be fair to the developer, though, they are pretty active on the game’s Discord and Steam channels, which is really good to see, and it seems like even feel they may a little over ambitious to have released now before they should have.

In a statement on the game’s Steam page on 12 June, they said while they had managed to deliver the scope of the game that together with the publisher we had planned, they could see there was still a bit to do before they moved onto their post-launch plans. “In hindsight, it seems clear now that we had underestimated the time we would need to balance all our game features and fix performance issues during the final sprint,” they said.

As an indicator that the devs are living true to their word to get the game to where it should be, two patches released already this month have added more actor animations and a whole slew of bug fixes and other additions.

While at the moment, Blockbuster Inc isn’t the game that the developers themselves want, and there is player frustration, it’s clear that they are committed to continue work on it.

Not a must buy in its current state, in a few months Blockbuster Inc could well be closer to being the successor to The Movies that fans were hoping for.