Blockbuster Inc. Is The Movies Game, Reimagined

As someone who has played hundreds of hours of – and still owns their original copy of – The Movies by Lionhead Studios, I’ve been excited for Blockbuster Inc. for a while. Although I can’t speak to it’s late-game features yet, from the six hours I played of it so far (stretching in-game time roughly from the year 1920 to 1928) it’s definitely the most accurate-to-the-experience fans of The Movies can get on modern hardware. It’s not perfect, and I’ve experienced some slowdown and stuttering occasionally – which, I dunno, may or may not be related to my own hardware, although it doesn’t happen usually while playing games – but either way, Blockbuster Inc. is worth checking out if you’ve been looking for something like Lionhead Studios’ cult filmmaking hit.

This isn’t a review – I’d have to play roughly a hundred more hours to review a game like this properly, get through all the time periods, unlock all the VFX, post-processing, and equipment features, get all the buildings… No. I’m playing this game like it was meant to be played for the first time – easiest difficulty, earliest time period possible to start in, and no cheating unless I fail. I forced myself to do the tutorial so I understood the mechanics properly up until a glitch prevented me from going to city view, so I figured that was good enough and, by making films based on CS Forester books peppered between trashy vampire B-movies, I was actually able to build a successful studio in a relatively short amount of time.

In Blockbuster Inc. You Control The Scene, The Structures, and the Stars

There’s a lot of the management stuff you’d expect – building your studio can be done manually or by placing different types of office buildings together, staff needs to be hired, assigned, and managed, actors have wants and needs that need to be met, sets can be designed from scratch or – through a neat bit of Steam integration – players can purchase sets created by other users, which allows you to make more unique looking films easily. The films themselves can be made with as much or as little of the player’s involvement as they wish – you can choose to direct every single scene if you wish and edit it through a fairly standard video editor, or just let the computer handle it, depending on your mood and level of momentary obsession. It’s a nice balance, and the ability to actually customize the offices ala The Sims, when all we had in The Movies was an office-shaped blueprint to go off of, is a welcome addition.

Now, again, it’s not perfect. Navigating the menus to go through your staff one by one to fix their needs, negotiate their pay, or move them into a new house is cumbersome at best, and frankly the whole housing system is a bit frustrating. I like it in theory, but the fact that you can’t just bite the financial bullet to put someone in a higher house than they want early, coupled with the fact that you have to evict someone from their current residence before moving them to a new one (why can’t this just be the same button? “Press accept if you want to evict CHARACTER NAME and move them to NEW HOME” would save minutes of tabbing back and forth.) it just feels like a little too much busywork. I’m not a real estate salesman, dammit, I’m a studio executive, I need to be worried about where these pools go and whether or not Susan is going to recover from that sword wound in time for reshoots before we miss the film circuit cutoff.

I’m inclined to be a bit forgiving of Blockbuster Inc. of these faults, partly because I loved The Movies so much, partly because I think they’ve made some neat additions to the gameplay and I really like the Awards Show as a end-of-year check-in on how you’re doing, and partly because its developer, Super Sly Fox, is a three-person team. In my opinion this game is absolutely worth purchasing if you loved The Movies as much as I did, and the fact that three people were able to come together and match Lionhead Studios at its best is, honestly, worth celebrating. Small teams making passionate projects is and will always be where the future of gaming is the most exciting, and I can’t wait to see what this team does next.

Looking for more indie games worth your time and money? Check out our coverage of the 2024 Wholesome Direct!